Jernigan, Helen

ORAL HISTORY OF HELEN JERNIGAN
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
March 27, 2002
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Helen, let’s start off first by having you tell us a little bit of background of where you were before you came to Oak Ridge and then why and how you came to Oak Ridge, okay?
Mrs. Jernigan: Okay. I was just finishing a year of college at Tennessee Wesleyan College and went home for the summer with no plans, no job, just glad to be out of school.
Mr. Kolb: When was this?
Mrs. Jernigan: This was in 1944, I guess. I’m not too good with dates for these things, forty – ’44, yes, the summer of ’44. And I went back home and reconnected with some of my friends there who were – some of whom were still in high school. And at this high school where I went, Pleasant Hill Academy, we had an interest there in preserving folklore and we did folk dancing and we traveled with these folk dances. We went to New York and Chicago, and it was a church school, congregational church, and this is one way they raised money for the school, by taking us to show off the children in school.
Mr. Kolb: Still do that today.
Mrs. Jernigan: Right. So they had been invited to come to Clinton. They told me to perform at a place in Clinton and they didn’t know much more than that about it, but it was at a theater and they wanted me to come along to play the piano for this folk dancing that they were going to do. So I did, and it turned out to be in Happy Valley, the construction site of K-25.
Mr. Kolb: Inside the project.
Mrs. Jernigan: Inside the plant. And on the stage with us were some other notables, Sam McGhee, Sam and Kirk McGhee of Grand Ole Opry stars and some other country music sort of things. And these dances of ours at Pleasant Hill Academy were mostly English country dances. They weren’t square dances. At any rate, we had this performance, and the man who owned the theater where we performed after the show asked –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, there was a theater out there?
Mrs. Jernigan: Oh, yes, I’ll tell you about that.
Mr. Kolb: This is an indoor theater performance.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: And he asked me if I’d like a job, and I said, “Sure.” So he said he needed a bookkeeper, and I didn’t know anything about bookkeeping, but I was too young and brash to know that I didn’t. So I went home and got my things and went back to Happy Valley to work for Mr. Rue.
Mr. Kolb: And this is in the summer.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, this was in the summer, and he had a group of young people there that he brought from Franklin, Tennessee where he came from. He had a theater, a bowling alley, a duck pin alley and a large recreation complex that he called Coney Island where there were games and basketball hoops and like a carnival sort of thing, like an arcade where you shop for things and you got prizes, and the prizes were mostly cigarettes.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is this in Happy Valley?
Mrs. Jernigan: Happy Valley.
Mr. Kolb: This Coney Island was in Happy Valley?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes. Also there was a supermarket, a bank, everything you needed was there.
Mr. Kolb: School?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, I don’t know; that I don’t know. I know that my next door neighbor, Jo Ellen Iacovino, who is Colleen Black’s sister, was a child there with her family and she went to a nursery school and they thought – they called it ‘Nazi school,’ and they thought that just beyond the fence was Germans, when they were little and lived in Happy Valley. But we were self-sufficient there, and I’d been there a short time I guess when I learned that there was a place called Townsite which was kind of a total mystery to us.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, and how long was that before you knew about Townsite?
Mrs. Jernigan: Well not too long, a couple of weeks I guess. I lived in a barracks there; they called them barracks. They were H-shaped dormitories like now, but they called them barracks and my barracks, men lived in one wing and women in the other. There were no locks, we had no keys for the door, and nobody stole anything that I recall. But of course, security – there was lots of security. And –
Mr. Kolb: Army security?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, yes and there was some, I’m sure Army security, and it was, I’ve written about this before, but you couldn’t tell night from day because they worked ’round the clock, you know, and there were big flood lights everywhere, so –
Mr. Kolb: Ok, in the middle of the night it was light?
Mrs. Jernigan: Right and music going from loud speakers night and day.
Mr. Kolb: I never heard that. Really?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Is that part of Bill Pollock’s operation?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, no, it was some pre-Pollock operation, but I remember Josephine, the tune Josephine over and over. You know they had – it was like Musak: there were about five numbers, all of which I happened to like. It was okay.
Mr. Kolb: I’m going to stop a minute.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: And I had, I don’t think I had a roommate there. Well I went back to college, and sort of kept the books for Mr. Rue.
Mr. Kolb: While you were in school?
Mrs. Jernigan: No. I’m backing up now to the summer. I never said anything about my job, but what I would do is do some books and record keeping for him in the afternoon and then at night I would help the other kids with the shooting galleries and the prizes and all that stuff. We had some things –
Mr. Kolb: Run the operations.
Mrs. Jernigan: Right. Now, we had some prizes besides the cigarettes. We had these little figurines that glowed in the dark, and when I wrote about this for Jim Overholt and the Children’s Museum, he took that out; he thought there was something spooky and irradiated about those. I don’t know what it was. You probably know.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, it’s a fluorescence material, yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: They fluoresced. Anyway, I went back to school and this was like I’d made it up. I mean, I would tell people where I was in the summer, “I was in Clinton.” I never, still never used the word Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Had you been to Townsite?
Mrs. Jernigan: I’d been to Townsite. Once in a while we would go into Townsite. No particular reason to, ’cause we had dances on Friday and Saturday night, live bands down at K, down at Happy Valley. It was totally a self-contained little town down there. And so we rarely went to Townsite, but there was a – I think a department store, clothing store that provided more than we had in Happy Valley. I’m not sure we had clothing.
Mr. Kolb: Was there a Loveman’s in Oak Ridge, in town?
Mrs. Jernigan: It may have been Loveman’s, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: But you had groceries and shopping for groceries and normal things in Happy Valley?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, and some clothing and banks and, you know, everything. And we were paid by J. A. Jones & Company. Everybody who worked there was paid by Jones, and of course there were many, many people working and living there and bused in there. And the funny thing, transportation throughout my early years in Oak Ridge – transportation was so automatic because it was so plentiful. I mean you just hopped on a bus and you went to Knoxville. You hopped on a bus and went anywhere, so much so that I don’t remember much of it. It was like brushing your teeth.
Mr. Kolb: You took it for granted.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, and sometimes when I think back about going to Knoxville or going to Clinton or something, I think, “How did I get there?” And I don’t know how I got there; the bus went there.
Mr. Kolb: And you never had to – did you have to pay for any of the buses?
Mrs. Jernigan: Not in the very early days you didn’t.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I meant, yeah. Even to Knoxville, you could go free?
Mrs. Jernigan: I think so. I believe so. I’m not sure, clear about that.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, it wasn’t very much, anyway.
Mrs. Jernigan: No, minimal if anything. And then when – next summer I came back and got a job.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and you graduated.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, and my dad had insisted that I take a typing course, which did not suit me, but I did, thank goodness, because it was the only tool I had; being a music major didn’t qualify me. And I typed very poorly, so that’s an indication of how easy it was to get a job here. You know, you just came here, you got a job.
Mr. Kolb: Well the fact that you worked the previous summer helped you probably, I would think.
Mrs. Jernigan: What?
Mr. Kolb: The fact that you’d worked the previous summer, some, maybe helped you get on.
Mrs. Jernigan: I doubt it. I think they just were hiring everybody.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and this is the summer of ’45?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, you just, you knew when you went in the employment office in Knoxville that you were going to get a job. And I really did not type well at all. I got a job in the Labor Relations Department at K-25 with Union Carbide doing applications for deferment of people that were there –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, Selective Service.
Mrs. Jernigan: – working and had to continually be deferred, and I did this for a little while, and in the same department was the Recreation Department and Thomas Francis Xavier McCarthy was the editor of the Carbide Courier and he shared the office – we were all – the Labor Relations and Recreation and the Carbide Courier were all in the same office, big office.
Mr. Kolb: Did you live at Happy Valley, still, then?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, no, at that time I lived in a dormitory in Oak Ridge, and Happy Valley was gone, you know. I mean, K-25 was there, the big buildings, the big buildings, but there was –
Mr. Kolb: The construction was over?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Basically?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. In one year.
Mrs. Jernigan: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: But the buildings were still there were they not?
Mrs. Jernigan: The buildings were there, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, but the town, workforce had been –
Mrs. Jernigan: The town, the workforce was, you know, the provisions and housing and all that from the workforce was gone just like it had never been. It was weird.
Mr. Kolb: By ’45?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So the construction of the K-25 building was finished and the big push of construction was over, and so you lived in Townsite, okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: And –
Mr. Kolb: So who did you live with then, in Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Jernigan: Random, random roommates. They just assigned you to a room and there was a roommate, and I remember living with – one of my roommates was secretary at the Chapel on the Hill. She was the church secretary, and a couple of them – I don’t know why I kept moving around; it’s not clear to me why I moved to other dormitories, but the ones in West Village were not quite as desirable as the ones in Townsite.
Mr. Kolb: Is that where you were, West Village?
Mrs. Jernigan: I lived in West Village first, so maybe that’s why I moved. I wanted to be closer to town. I don’t remember. And then I remember living with a shift worker for a while who would be sleeping when I wasn’t, but we always got along very well. I liked them all, and no problem. And then I managed to move to get for my roommate a girl that had been my little sister in college. We had this big and little sister system. And she and I then roomed together for –
Mr. Kolb: Who was that?
Mrs. Jernigan: Helen Watts, and she got married and was Helen Hopkins and now lives in Ohio. And that was nice. I liked all, all my roommates, and with it, for recreation – the reason – I’m going to go back for a minute to my work in the Labor Relations Department and all that; didn’t last long because of McCarthy, Tommy McCarthy. Tommy McCarthy was a little guy from New York City who was the editor of the Carbide Courier and later came to work for ORAU in public relations there. He was a character and you’ll hear about him from other people I’m sure, but he leant me books. I was a veracious reader in those days. He leant me books and asked me to do book reviews for the Carbide Courier, which I did, and he liked my writing, so he made me his associate editor, and I did that, then, the rest of my stay, rest of my employment with Union Carbide and –
Mr. Kolb: So you got your writing career started in that way.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes and I had been – had a minor in English, so that suited me and that’s what I did.
Mr. Kolb: And about how long did that last, do you know?
Mrs. Jernigan: Two to three years.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, after the war, probably.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes and I’d have to look at my thing that I filled out for you to see what I did next, but as far as recreation, there were music groups that interested me most of all. There were music listening groups and we had, McCarthy had. He was a jazz aficionado and Clark Center, who was the head guy at K-25, had played in a jazz group at one time, and so that got to – the jazz group was interesting. We’d just go listen to recorded jazz.
Mr. Kolb: These were local people that played together?
Mrs. Jernigan: No this, we just listened to recorded –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, listened, listened, okay, okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: Recorded jazz. No, they didn’t, none of them, I don’t think, at that time played, but they were just appreciators of jazz.
Mr. Kolb: Where did you do this?
Mrs. Jernigan: In people’s homes, but then there was a music appreciation group that met in Ridge Rec Hall, and then there was the early – pretty early on there was the Community Chorus, which I sang with, and so very early music was part of recreation for me.
Mr. Kolb: Who directed that chorus? Do you remember that?
Mrs. Jernigan: Almost, well, Harry Carper did, for one.
Mr. Kolb: I interviewed him and he referred to being a director, yeah, I think you’re right. I think I know you’re right.
Mrs. Jernigan: He did.
Mr. Kolb: He was at Chapel on the Hill, I think.
Mrs. Jernigan: I believe so.
Mr. Kolb: That’s right.
Mrs. Jernigan: He may have directed there, that church choir, later on, but this was a community group.
Mr. Kolb: And probably started about the same time as the symphony maybe or the orchestra, whatever it was called?
Mrs. Jernigan: I think so, I believe so.
Mr. Kolb: About ’44 or ’43 or ’44, somewhere in there? So your music – you did get [to use] some of your music appreciation.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, did get to use it.
Mr. Kolb: Was singing your – did you play the piano? Or did you –
Mrs. Jernigan: Played piano.
Mr. Kolb: And you sang partly, your, you know –
Mrs. Jernigan: Some. You sing in the choir don’t you?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, my wife and I both do, and we’re just average, you know, you just –
Mrs. Jernigan: But it’s fun.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, you’re right. So music, you had fulfillment you might say in your musical desires that way, and I assume there were lots of people like that.
Mrs. Jernigan: Oh yes.
Mr. Kolb: I mean, that jazz grew, how big a number you talking about?
Mrs. Jernigan: Well the jazz group wasn’t very big. It was maybe ten people and very loosely – it wasn’t organized, you know. We’d just go over to somebody’s house if they had a record, and then I got to know Horace Sarudy and Bill Pollock early on, and through them Ed Westcott, so I knew –
Mr. Kolb: Was that in the Jazz group?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, I just – musically, because Westcott and Sarudy had grown up together. They were little boys in Nashville together. They were old friends.
Mr. Kolb: I heard they were good friends, I didn’t know they were children –
Mrs. Jernigan: Children together.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I didn’t know that, ’cause I knew Horace when he worked at Music Box, bought some stuff from him, like we all did. From Music Box – that was it. And, well, did you like to dance? I mean there were a lot of dances going on every weekend.
Mrs. Jernigan: Oh yes, yes, oh, every – twice a week, Wednesday nights – it seems like Wednesday night, I don’t know, some week night, and Saturday night, the tennis court dances or the – in the Ridge Rec Hall, and then they – so, danced all the time with everyone.
Mr. Kolb: Is that where you met your first husband?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, I met him folk dancing.
Mr. Kolb: Folk dancing. Well, that’s a form of dancing.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes. By this time, I lived in a house with five other women.
Mr. Kolb: “D” house?
Mrs. Jernigan: A “D” house on Taylor Road, and at the Elm Grove School, which was just down the block, not even a block away from where I lived, they had regular weekly folk dancing, so I was delighted to find that there, out of which came out of my Pleasantville Academy experience, so I went to those and that’s where I met Ed.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. I’d never heard about the folk dancing. Now who led that? I mean, was that kind of just an interest group too or –
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes and the McCallans, Helen and Hank McCallan, and Ken and Helen Warren, I think, were in that group, and let’s see –
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I know of the McCallan’s. Are they still around?
Mrs. Jernigan: I think that folk dance group may be still alive.
Mr. Kolb: There is a folk dance group, yeah you’re right.
Mrs. Jernigan: I think it’s the same, I believe its root –
Mr. Kolb: Continuing.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, has survived.
Mr. Kolb: Well that was an early, early activity, yeah. In fact there’s even something called the International Dance group, maybe even.
Mrs. Jernigan: Something.
Mr. Kolb: They go beyond American dances, maybe.
Mrs. Jernigan: This group did too, and I don’t remember who was the leader or whether they took turns. I didn’t go.
Mr. Kolb: This is a grassroots movement basically.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, sprang up.
Mr. Kolb: And how big, how many people were involved in that roughly?
Mrs. Jernigan: Quite a few, I’d say maybe thirty with Gilpatricks. That’s where I met them first.
Mr. Kolb: Were they married then?
Mrs. Jernigan: I’m not sure. I believe they were, but I’m not sure.
Mr. Kolb: So, now, when you lived on Taylor Road, did you do your own cooking? Did you go to the cafeterias?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes we did our – oh, we took great pride in doing our own cooking. We –
Mr. Kolb: You gals that lived together.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, we had – we were very organized. We had one night each week that we cooked, and we – the Elm Grove Grocery Store was just across the street from us, so we got our provisions there. We pooled our money; we were organized. And we had a lot of parties. We, there were a lot of young men in “D” houses and there were sort of a “D” house culture, you know. We all knew each other as – we who lived in “D” houses were usually acquainted with each other and –
Mr. Kolb: Just from your area, ’cause there were lots of these “D” houses, groups, you mean, other places in town?
Mrs. Jernigan: Right, we didn’t – no not necessarily from our area. There was one, particularly one that we were close, perhaps closer to on – I remember it was at 215 East Tennessee Avenue. I know it’s the corner of Tennessee and Florida, that we knew, those guys, you know, were kind of our buddies.
Mr. Kolb: “D” house culture, that’s a good way to put it. You shared a lot of things in other words, maybe even stockings, you know, in a pinch, right?
Mrs. Jernigan: And then one of my roommates, Elsie Burton Hockey, somehow she was, she worked in travel at K-25 and she had something to do with the arrival of the MIT practice school fellows, and she used to bring them by in waves when they would come, and they would drink up all our coffee and talk and argue, and so we had, we ran sort of a coffee house there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, in your apartment, you mean?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, this was in the “D” house.
Mr. Kolb: In the “D” house, that’s what I meant, yeah in the “D” house, yeah, okay. Kind of a welcome center, right? Maybe of sorts? Of course those guys were living in another – probably lived in dorms, I imagine.
Mrs. Jernigan: I don’t know where they lived. I think they lived in dorms, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: But did you ever go to the cafeterias, like on weekends, or, you know, eat out?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, well, when, when I, before I moved to the house, when I lived in dormitories, I ate at the cafeteria all the time.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, which one? T&C?
Mrs. Jernigan: Central.
Mr. Kolb: Central, right by Jackson Square?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Did it become T&C later on?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause I ate there a lot.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, right below, and that was called Central Cafeteria.
Mrs. Jernigan: Right, and then at West Village there was a cafeteria – Jefferson, I guess, it was called, but – and it seems to me they had pretty good food. I don’t remember not liking it or complaining. And I must have eaten two meals a day there, because we did not cook in the dormitory.
Mr. Kolb: Oh that’s right, yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: We didn’t have, maybe we weren’t allowed to, but we didn’t even have hotplates in the dorm.
Mr. Kolb: You weren’t supposed to, at least. But there was a lot of activity going on in town.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, and everybody was young.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: You know that, and I remember thinking, even back then, I remember thinking, one of these days we’re going to be like St. Petersburg, we’re going to all be old at the same time.
Mr. Kolb: Sure enough it has happened. More or less, yeah. Well, Helen, tell me a little bit more about your Carbide employment then, what you were doing, okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: Okay. We printed the Carbide Courier in Knoxville ’cause there was no printing facility in Oak Ridge, so we would write the material for it and make pictures and all and take it into Knoxville where – to a printing place on North Central, and they did the old fashioned typesetting thing and layout. They did the layout for us. We would have a mockup of the layout. But I did several features and whatever needed to be done. There were only two of us, but one of the things that I enjoyed most was that we had a column called ‘The Carbide Lamp,’ in which we profiled people who worked at K-25, and Tommy McCarthy had been doing that until the time that I started to work for the Courier, and he’d only done the brass. He’d started with Clark Center and he was working his way down, and my first person to interview was Paul Huber, and he was very charming and easy to interview, and then I got a bee in my bonnet about democratizing it and writing about everybody at all levels of employment, so I was pleased that they let me do that, and continued to do that throughout my work there.
Mr. Kolb: So you went beyond your musical reviews that you started out and you went broader into everything.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes and we had feature articles, you know. We would write about the Power House one week and we would – news, if there was news, and we had music reviews and book reviews and –
Mr. Kolb: Did you still do book reviews in addition to your other assignments?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, still did those, right, and whatever needed to be done. I even did sports sometimes.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness. Now were there other – I’ve heard about the Carbide News, but there were other contractors here? Carbide just ran K-25, right?
Mrs. Jernigan: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Originally.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Were there other contractor papers in town at the time?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, Y-12 had a paper and the editor was a man named George Dobbs and it may have even preceded the Carbide Courier, and we had a loose connection, us editors. And at X-10, Mark – a man named Mark Sims was the editor, and I worked there briefly, for the ORNL News. And then I had surgery; I had a ruptured disk and had to have surgery and had to be out for about [a] month and –
Mr. Kolb: Just too much dancing or what?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, actually I had gone for a long motorcycle ride with Ed Fairstein, and that’s what had happened.
Mr. Kolb: A rough ride, probably.
Mrs. Jernigan: So my – I still rode with him after that, after I had a fusion, but I had to stop – I thought I had to quit my job at ORNL News, although they didn’t suggest that. I thought if I was going to – they had just started it; it was just in the formative period where we were deciding policy and talking to people and getting connected with people, and I thought it was too burdensome for the editor to have to do alone, and that he needed to get somebody healthy and who was coming to work right away, so I resigned from that against his wishes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, ’cause you had, you had a good experience in the other paper, that you brought with you.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: And that’s why you wanted to have, well what time, what year is this about?
Mrs. Jernigan: Let’s see, I’m not sure. All of this happened rather quickly it seems to me. This must have been about 1948, or something like that.
Mr. Kolb: So you went from Carbide Courier to the ORNL News?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, and I didn’t even put that in here, it was so brief, but it was 1948. And then after I recovered from this –
Mr. Kolb: And you were still single then?
Mrs. Jernigan: Un-huhn. After I recovered from this surgery, I went to work for Bush Building Company, who constructed the Garden Apartments, as their office manager. And then, that’s when I got – while I was working there, I married, and after that, it looks like I couldn’t hold a job.
Mr. Kolb: You just had a storied career. Bounced from one thing to another just looking for something you really –
Mrs. Jernigan: And learned something from every one of them, as you know.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, right. So you were an office manager of the apartments, Garden Apartments?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, the construction.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, construction.
Mrs. Jernigan: It was the construction. As a matter of fact, Bush Building Company did the water and sewer lines. They were a Nashville company and they all lived in Nashville, and, I mean, they all lived here during the week in hotels or dormitories or something. And there were a hundred, about a hundred men employed here, and their supervisory personnel all came from Nashville every Monday morning and went back to Nashville every Friday afternoon. And our offices were with the main contractor who was Merritt, Chapman & Scott down in West Village.
Mr. Kolb: I see. Well, after they were built, then, did you stay on with that company?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, they finished the job, and then I went to work for Dr. Williams and Dr. Helm at the Medical Arts building, old, old, Medical Arts building, and met – Dr. Williams was the general practitioner, Dr. Helm was a surgeon, and they – Dr. Williams left to go to Harlan, Kentucky, where he finished his career, because he wanted to help people, poor people, and Dr. Helm, I don’t know what happened to him, but he – I worked for them until my first child was born.
Mr. Kolb: But how did you get into the medical, I mean, were they advertising for a person or did you know somebody who knew them?
Mrs. Jernigan: I knew somebody who was their office manager and she stopped to have a child or something and she told me that she –
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and you heard about the vacancy.
Mrs. Jernigan: Had heard about the vacancy, just about the time that the work on the Garden Apartments ended, so I just –
Mr. Kolb: And they finally ��� there was nothing you couldn’t do, so they just hired you.
Mrs. Jernigan: Nothing I wouldn’t try, let’s put it that way.
Mr. Kolb: So you were married by that time?
Mrs. Jernigan: I think, yes, married and worked there till I had my first child. In fact, the doctors supplied formula and they supplied everything I possibly needed.
Mr. Kolb: Is that your last full time occupation, or you went back to work for the Oak Ridger at one point.
Mrs. Jernigan: Oh yes, I worked for the Oak Ridger then.
Mr. Kolb: I think you took some years off.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Kind of raising your family for a while.
Mrs. Jernigan: Right. During that time – I didn’t mention that on here, but when my children were small I gave piano lessons for a while.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, you got back in your musical venue.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, for a few years. It was sort of on the barter system. I gave lessons to a women who did alterations for me, you know, we exchanged things, and a neighbor’s child; I had about six students, something like that.
Mr. Kolb: Friends, kind of, probably.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Was Mrs. Varagona teaching then? You know, she taught forever, she still is, but that’s probably before her time.
Mrs. Jernigan: No I don’t think so. I think that was before her time.
Mr. Kolb: My daughters took from her. Let’s go back a little bit. I think we’ve covered your employment pretty well. Let’s go back a little bit to what it was like when the war ended and when the bomb was dropped in Oak Ridge. What was the feeling, and what was your experience?
Mrs. Jernigan: That was just very, very, of course, very exciting. I remember we would – when we’d gather to celebrate this – and I’m not sure where we gathered – but there was an enormous crowd of us, and when I see the – the picture, the old picture, photograph that shows the war –
Mr. Kolb: Was that a spontaneous gathering or what?
Mrs. Jernigan: Well, it – no, it wasn’t spontaneous, but I don’t recall how we knew about it. It was like a – whether announcements were made at work, or how we knew to gather, and I don’t even remember where we gathered, but it seems to me it was outside.
Mr. Kolb: Well, Ed Westcott’s famous picture of that gathering, I suspect it may have been Townsite but I’m not sure.
Mrs. Jernigan: It may well have been, yes, but it was very exciting and it’s just incredible that none of us knew, I mean that so few of us knew.
Mr. Kolb: Did you hear any rumors, I mean did you –
Mrs. Jernigan: Not one.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause you weren’t supposed to, but, you know.
Mrs. Jernigan: No, the general conversation was that we were making something for the war effort.
Mr. Kolb: Right, yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: And I had a general feeling that it might be some sort of weapons, but I didn’t think it was any kind of new and strange weapons.
Mr. Kolb: Oh I see, like it was.
Mrs. Jernigan: No, I thought it [was] just ordinary weapons that I – that were – that I knew about, you know, I thought maybe just a lot of those.
Mr. Kolb: Right.
Mrs. Jernigan: Maybe just an enormous quantity of the conventional weapons.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve heard that there was a rumor that there was some sort of artillery operation going on in Oak Ridge. This was maybe from outsiders trying to guess what was going on inside the project. That was one of the guesses, you know. That was wrong, but looking at – it was unconventional, but you know that was just somebody just guessing, you know, but anyway. So how long did this party go on? I mean, did it start in the morning or was it –
Mrs. Jernigan: I don’t remember, Jim. I remember just being very excited and other people going from the dormitory or whatever and I don’t remember a whole lot of it.
Mr. Kolb: Were you in the dorm then?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: In West Village and that’s why I thought that there was something in West Village, but there may not have been.
Mr. Kolb: Maybe there were several different parties.
Mrs. Jernigan: There may have been, that’s possible, but the odd thing is, really, to me, is the fact that even among intimate conversations with people, there was no speculation expressed. You would think that people sitting down in the privacy of their homes or their dates or whatever would say, “What do you really – what do you think we’re doing here?” That didn’t happen. We never talked about it, never.
Mr. Kolb: At least among the people you were –
Mrs. Jernigan: That I associated with.
Mr. Kolb: Right.
Mrs. Jernigan: They would – you’d talk about when you were supposed to go to work and what the work schedule was and where you worked but no speculation about what we were doing even among trusted people in private conversation.
Mr. Kolb: Right, yeah. So the prohibition against security talk was really – but did you see any evidence of people that were checking up on people in town ever?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Were there many?
Mrs. Jernigan: Not in Oak Ridge proper, but when I lived at K-25, in Happy Valley, there was one amusing incident. I had invited some college friends to come, couple of girls, maybe three to come and spend the weekend with me. And I got passes for them –
Mr. Kolb: Really, you could get passes?
Mrs. Jernigan: Got passes and all that, and they came, and I didn’t have enough beds, I think I had two beds, so I borrowed mattresses from some women who were going away for the weekend or something in the dormitory, and we put those in the room. And on Monday morning, early, after the girls had gone back home and I was about to take the mattresses back, the FBI came calling on me and they said that I had removed government property.
Mr. Kolb: Which I guess you had.
Mrs. Jernigan: Right.
Mr. Kolb: You had moved it. You hadn’t removed it; you just moved it.
Mrs. Jernigan: Right, I’d moved it. I had to explain that I was going to put it back, in fact had to put it back before somebody came back who had needed it, but the alacrity with which they responded to that made me know that something –
Mr. Kolb: Big brother was out there, kind of.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes. And once I got called in at K-25 and warned that they might look upon me as a security risk because I forgot my badge so many times. I was pretty airy fairy about that badge, and I would show up at work and have to get a temporary pass and all, and then that wasn’t all they had on my record. It turned out I had reviewed a book that they didn’t like. Wasn’t my fault; it was one that McCarthy had leant me. But it was The Yogi and the Commissar and it was about Communism and they didn’t like that at all.
Mr. Kolb: So they were watching you, right? Sounds like it, a little bit.
Mrs. Jernigan: They were.
Mr. Kolb: Of course you were writing copy, so you were –
Mrs. Jernigan: And then they also pointed out to me that they had observed me sitting on the grass with a photographer for our newsletter and blowing on blades of grass out in the lawn, you know, when we should have been working.
Mr. Kolb: Oh my goodness, so obviously they were following –
Mrs. Jernigan: They were.
Mr. Kolb: Kind of checking up on people.
Mrs. Jernigan: And there was an old Irish cop named McCarthy, named Mc – what, I don’t know. He had an Irish name and he had come out of the New York PD and was tough as nails on security down there. Everybody was scared to death of him.
Mr. Kolb: Was he FBI do you think?
Mrs. Jernigan: Wasn’t FBI, I don’t think. He was just a cop, but he was the big cop at K-[25].
Mr. Kolb: He was known as somebody to be – don’t get in crossways with him.
Mrs. Jernigan: The big cop at K-25, big stern looking guy, you know. We were scared to death of him.
Mr. Kolb: And was this when you were at Happy Valley?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, this was at K-25, regular K-25.
Mr. Kolb: So you had this feeling that, you know, you didn’t want to screw up too much or things might happen.
Mrs. Jernigan: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: I’ll be darned. Well I’ve heard rumors of this effect and there was activity going on, it wasn’t just – you know, it was serious, and that people – I guess some people probably were removed if they didn’t follow the procedures or whatever.
Mrs. Jernigan: When I was at K-25, I had met a man who I went out with several times, and sometimes we went over to Rockwood. There was a place, a nightclub over there, of a honky-tonk probably – we thought it was a nightclub – and danced, and they had live music, and often he would take his friend with us, another man, and all of a sudden his friend disappeared, and he told me that his friend was a bootlegger, and that they had found out about his bootlegging activities, and out with him.
Mr. Kolb: Oh he was working in the private bootlegging. So that was enough to –
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah that was his construction – that was back with J. A. Jones, and they were construction workers.
Mr. Kolb: So bootleggers were not acceptable. Yeah, well I can understand that, but yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: And I remember that this man my friend referred to the – he was pretty contemptuous of that. He didn’t like the fact that his friend had to leave, and he was fairly contemptuous. I remember he called them the Gestapo, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my, yeah, didn’t like the authority, right. So anyway, the war ended and things changed real fast of course. Y-12 went way down and Happy Valley was gone –
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: – population took a nosedive for a few years there – of course, things were still muddy; now let’s talk about the mud.
Mrs. Jernigan: You know, I didn’t experience mud. I think the people who came and were married and lived in houses – but I –
Mr. Kolb: Okay, around the dorms, it wasn’t so bad?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, I never – I read about the mud, but I never experienced the mud.
Mr. Kolb: Not as much at least.
Mrs. Jernigan: No. I remember the boardwalks, and I went to church at United Church, there was youth group there that I joined, hooked up with, and we used to build fires out behind the Chapel on the Hill and roast marshmallows and things and sing, and I remember particularly that boardwalk that we traveled up there in that region.
Mr. Kolb: Well, yeah, I think you’re right; it’s more up on the hillside where people were having rapid construction and –
Mrs. Jernigan: Where the houses were.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, but that was one of the famous things you hear about. Well, and that brings me to the question – when you went into Knoxville, which I assume you did occasionally, maybe to shop or party or whatever, how were you treated or what was the attitude?
Mrs. Jernigan: I didn’t experience any bad attitudes. It may have been because I wasn’t –
Mr. Kolb: You were Tennessean. You did have an outside – the non-Tennessee voice?
Mrs. Jernigan: Right, right. I didn��t sound like a foreigner, but I never experienced anything.
Mr. Kolb: But did you go into Knoxville frequently to shop or whatever?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes. Went in to shop, buy clothes and shoes especially, I remember especially buying shoes in Knoxville, and I remember one shoe salesman that had worked here in Oak Ridge, or either subsequently worked in Oak Ridge, because I remember seeing that man here in Oak Ridge in addition to his shoe shop, shoe store. And I remember, I didn’t know it at the time, but Will Minter’s father was the chef at Miller’s. Miller’s Department store had a restaurant.
Mr. Kolb: Right, I remember that. That went on for a long time ’cause I remember going there.
Mrs. Jernigan: And Will’s father until he retired fairly recently, I guess, was the chief guy there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, he’s still alive?
Mrs. Jernigan: Still alive.
Mr. Kolb: So you didn’t really have any –
Mrs. Jernigan: No bad experiences.
Mr. Kolb: – outside kind of feeling of being not accepted?
Mrs. Jernigan: No I had –
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause you had plenty of money, that was one thing, you got well paid, and they were glad to get your business.
Mrs. Jernigan: Well, I don’t know about that, but –
Mr. Kolb: Well, relatively.
Mrs. Jernigan: Relatively, yes, and as you point out, I was a Tennessean and I didn’t sound different from – they probably didn’t know I was from Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Right, right. If you didn’t have a lot of mud on your shoes, that was the other clue.
Mrs. Jernigan: Give away. I went to Clinton fairly often too.
Mr. Kolb: For what reason?
Mrs. Jernigan: To shop.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: I bought clothes there.
Mr. Kolb: Was Hammer’s there then?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, not Hammer’s. There was a guy, that Clinton Toggery was there, Mr. McGinley, who ran the Hoskins Drug Store at Elm Grove. There was a Hoskins Drug Store at Elm Grove, and he managed that, and his wife had a dress shop in Clinton, and I used to like to go to Clinton because it was pretty by the river there, and nothing was very pretty here in those days, you know. We cut down a lot of things and the drive along the river was so beautiful, and I would just ride over to Clinton just to see the river.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, with other girlfriends?
Mrs. Jernigan: Sometimes, yeah, we’d say, let’s go to Clinton, and this ever present bus thing, you know, just so easy to get places.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve heard that people go to Big Ridge Park.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Maybe even, I don’t know about Norris, but Big Ridge I’ve mentioned as being kind of a hangout –
Mrs. Jernigan: Big Ridge was, it was.
Mr. Kolb: Like a weekend spot. Did you do that too?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, yes, I did that too. Swimming and picnicking.
Mr. Kolb: And the bus took you there?
Mrs. Jernigan: Well, I think boyfriends took me there, ’cause that seems to me that was when, after – I don’t believe there was a – there probably was a bus to Big Ridge, but I don’t remember riding the bus there. But it may well have been. I mean, [it was] a very popular place.
Mr. Kolb: Think of swimming, did you ever go to the Oak Ridge Pool, swimming pool?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Much, I mean, in the summer time?
Mrs. Jernigan: Un-huhn.
Mr. Kolb: Lot of people went there.
Mrs. Jernigan: Lot of people. Yes, I went there. And also, there was a pool at Solway where we went, too, and I don’t know who owned it or what, but there was a little pool at Solway that – after I had young children, because the Oak Ridge pool was so cold – and some of us with young children found out that there was a pool at Solway that had warmer water and we took our little ones over there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I see, it didn’t chill them so badly I bet, yeah. Yeah, okay, let’s stop for a second.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: And where else did you go, Helen?
Mrs. Jernigan: We went to the Smokies. We had – I belonged to the Carbide Girls Club when I worked at K-25, and I was the President for one term, and very active for several years, and we had dances. We hired main bands, I mean, nationally known, and I think we had –
Mr. Kolb: Really, out of Nashville?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, out of New York. We had – my memory is lapsing, but Ted Weems, we had Ted Weems, and we had – and we could get a name band for less than a thousand dollars in those days.
Mr. Kolb: That was a lot of money then.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah. And we had – I think Woody Herman was here once.
Mr. Kolb: Wow. Was this before or after the war ended?
Mrs. Jernigan: This was, I think, after – this was after the war.
Mr. Kolb: And where would the concerts be held?
Mrs. Jernigan: They’d be dances at Grove Center in the old Grove Center place, which later became the Paragon and all that. But that was the biggest, I think that was, accommodated the most people at Grove Center. But we went to Gatlinburg. We would have house parties and we would go there for the weekend and do horseback riding and do other things, and since we were housed with the Recreation Department, it was incumbent upon me to support its activities, so every time they would give – they would have groups of people, you know, tennis and golf and horseback riding, I’d have to go and add to the numbers to kind of advocate.
Mr. Kolb: Were you a golfer until you were expected to become a golfer?
Mrs. Jernigan: No.
Mr. Kolb: Well how about horseback riding?
Mrs. Jernigan: I had done horseback riding. But there was lots of recreation. I mean there was just –
Mr. Kolb: Bowling and –
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, bowling.
Mr. Kolb: ’Course, now, golf, there wasn’t really golf available unless you went into Knoxville.
Mrs. Jernigan: No, I think I may have been mistaken about the golf, because later I did take a golf course, but I think it was from the Y. I don’t believe it was from the old Carbide Recreation Department, but there were lots of things. And there was a large skating rink at Grove, at Jefferson.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, inside.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, and people, I can remember when I worked –
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know that.
Mrs. Jernigan: It was big and when I worked at the Courier –
Mr. Kolb: Where was the building it was held in?
Mrs. Jernigan: It was just at the intersection of – is that Jefferson there?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, where the stoplight is?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Where the Shell station is?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, just towards the Boy’s Club there, that big building right there.
Mr. Kolb: Where there’s an old bank building now. I mean it’s vacant, but yeah. So there was a big building there.
Mrs. Jernigan: Big skating rink, roller rink.
Mr. Kolb: Was it called a rec hall or recreation hall or just –
Mrs. Jernigan: No, it was just the roller rink and they played roller hockey there. Roller hockey was a big deal.
Mr. Kolb: I never heard about that before.
Mrs. Jernigan: Big deal.
Mr. Kolb: Was it the only roller skating place in town?
Mrs. Jernigan: I think so. No, no I think, let’s see – yes it was. Yes, but it was large. And people got married on skates there.
Mr. Kolb: My goodness sakes.
Mrs. Jernigan: There was important –
Mr. Kolb: Craziness went on even then.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: People do strange things to get married anymore, so it was not unusual. I’ve heard that the Special Engineering Detachment Army group, maybe it wasn’t, but they had sports teams – football, basketball. Did people, I guess, ever attend those games? Like they played at Blankenship Field?
Mrs. Jernigan: I didn’t.
Mr. Kolb: Did you know about them?
Mrs. Jernigan: Didn’t even know about them.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: I knew about the Special Engineering people of course, who attended all the dances, but other than dance partners, I didn’t know them too well and wasn’t sports minded. I mean I was never very sports minded, anyway.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I just wondered whether it would’ve, ’cause I’ve been told by a SED member that they had all these teams, you know, and it was a big activity, when they competed in a league, perhaps, but anyway, I just wondered. Well how about high school games, did you ever go to those? Football or –
Mrs. Jernigan: No, not till I had kids that were that age.
Mr. Kolb: Right, older, yeah. Well then, the town kept growing and finally there was talk about opening the gates, right? Becoming normalized. How did that – were you involved in that to any degree?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, in fact I did not attend the famous opening, and I don’t know why. I don’t remember why – maybe I went home. I went home to Pleasant Hill at least once a month for the whole weekend, just routinely went back home, since it was so close and ��
Mr. Kolb: Do you have siblings?
Mrs. Jernigan: No.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, didn’t know.
Mrs. Jernigan: Parents.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: And I guess I had grandparents still there when I first came here. My grandmother was still living but not my grandfather.
Mr. Kolb: So you had frequent visits back and forth. And so you missed the big opening. But I mean, I understand there was some controversy. Some people didn’t want the town to be opened up and didn’t want it to become normal and fought it for a while.
Mrs. Jernigan: That’s right. I was aware of that, that there were people who thought that. I don’t know –
Mr. Kolb: “We’re going to start paying taxes here one of these days,” you know, things like that.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, and that those hillbillies would just come in. They carried shotguns; they’d come in and get us.
Mr. Kolb: Really? Hillbillies?
Mrs. Jernigan: There were some people who were literally afraid of the natives, I mean afraid of some unknown out there that – we’d been so protected here.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, yeah, right, sheltered, yeah. I’ll be darned – the hillbillies. So that was a reflection of Oak Ridge bias.
Mrs. Jernigan: Town and gown. And I remember that, and that has troubled us for a long time and still continues, that people in the county outside Oak Ridge think we’re all rich, you know, and think we’re all educated.
Mr. Kolb: They’re jealous, jealous, yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: And they’ve got a little jealousy there.
Mr. Kolb: Even though it’s not true.
Mrs. Jernigan: And for our part we think that they’re all – I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: Well we’ve said the word ‘hillbilly,’ and that’s kind of a crude, you know, form, you know.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, rednecks.
Mr. Kolb: Or whatever, I think, so whatever, you know, it’s not true either.
Mrs. Jernigan: But I think that, I hope that’s –
Mr. Kolb: It’s us and them, kind of like, yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: Us and them, a town and gown sort of thing.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right.
Mrs. Jernigan: I hope that’s changing.
Mr. Kolb: Well it’s still there to a degree, old stories never die very easily, but it did happen of course. Now, when did you get active in politics? You’ve been active in politics locally long. When did that start? I mean, with your first husband?
Mrs. Jernigan: I think, no, well before that, I think I voted for Harry Truman the first time, first time I voted in a presidential election.
Mr. Kolb: Was it ’48?
Mrs. Jernigan: Must have voted before that if it was ’48 ’cause I was old enough.
Mr. Kolb: See, Roosevelt died in ’44, didn’t he? And Truman took over and then he ran and – when it was ’46, anyway. ’46, ’48, whichever.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, anyway, I voted.
Mr. Kolb: Right after the war.
Mrs. Jernigan: After the war, yes.
Mr. Kolb: But I mean, you became – voting is one thing, but you became active in party politics at some point.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, right. I think in Albert – when I first became really active was in – Albert Gore, Sr. was senator, and I worked in his campaigns. I was women’s coordinator for Oak Ridge for the Gore campaign then, and just never have stopped and got interested on a local level as well because I do –
Mr. Kolb: Did some friend get you involved in that or did you –
Mrs. Jernigan: Lloyd Alexander.
Mr. Kolb: Lloyd Alexander. I took engineering from him at [unclear: ORSO].
Mrs. Jernigan: He noticed that I was interested in politics but didn’t seem to know where to go with it, you know, and he got me involved, and –
Mr. Kolb: And he was involved?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: So that was the beginning, with Gore, Sr.
Mrs. Jernigan: Right.
Mr. Kolb: But I mean, you were also at a local level too.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: The county.
Mrs. Jernigan: Un-huhn. As I became acquainted with other Democratic Party members, when I – then, they were involved on all levels.
Mr. Kolb: I guess you knew the Claibornes?
Mrs. Jernigan: Oh, yes.
Mr. Kolb: Is she still around?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, she moved to South Carolina. She’s built a house on her grandfather’s land, perhaps her great-grandfather had lived there also, and it was a very sentimental sort of move for her, but she comes back periodically.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. She was here during the war? I mean, I didn’t know that until – I knew him.
Mrs. Jernigan: I don’t believe she was here during the war.
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know, I mean –
Mrs. Jernigan: I think they came a little later. I’m not sure about that, but, yes we worked together on things.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: And she was, as I’m sure you know, she was one of the driving forces for incorporation [of the City of Oak Ridge].
Mr. Kolb: Oh she was? I didn’t know that.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes. She sort of headed up the – spearheaded that movement and did a lot of the –
Mr. Kolb: Wasn’t she active in the North Ridge Trail?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes she was.
Mr. Kolb: Were you involved in that?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, just grateful, ’cause it – we could see it almost from here.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right?
Mrs. Jernigan: We’re so close to it.
Mr. Kolb: Kind of named after her, I guess, for a while. I know we got national recognition; it was an honor.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, it’s recognized as a national walking trail, I think they call it. And we’ve got maps and everything.
Mr. Kolb: Yep, it’s one of our features, yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: Once in a while we clear off an access path down to it, and then we let it grow up again.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, they were one of the active people, I remember, in Democratic circles for a long time. I just didn’t know where she went after her husband died. I know she sold that house up on West Outer.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, and she also formed, founded, gathered together a group called the Concerned Democrats, which was a group opposed to the Vietnam War, and I was a member of that as well.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I see, so, a sub-group of the Democrats.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: I remember that name, yeah. Lots of activities, lots of activities. Well what do you think, looking back? I should say this – gotta say this correctly because my wife’s a school teacher. She always corrects me when I say ‘most unique.’ It either is or isn’t unique. But yet, what is the most unique aspect of your Oak Ridge remembrances, if you can pick one or two out of all the things you went through and –
Mrs. Jernigan: I think the first is the Happy Valley experience, because it was so otherworldly. I mean, it was like, unreal, and I didn’t know where I was. I mean, nobody – I didn’t know that this was Oak Ridge or didn’t know until later, and it was just a kind of a little –
Mr. Kolb: Microcosm?
Mrs. Jernigan: Microcosm, exactly. That was the most dramatically different of anything I’d ever experienced before or since, to see that enormous activity, of building –
Mr. Kolb: Constant, 24 hours a day.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, and to be living there, and that was probably the most dramatic thing. And all my years have been pleasurable and all my jobs have been interesting, but I think that had the most, the most unique.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, yeah, I’m sure it would be, yeah. That’s what I’ve been told, you know, that you just can’t believe the activity, and, well, when you think about 75,000 people living in Oak Ridge, I mean, and you say the buses never stopped, that the people at the cafeterias never stopped, things went on seven days a week night and day, bedlam, I only think, almost controlled bedlam.
Mrs. Jernigan: Right, that’s a good description.
Mr. Kolb: But your involvement in the publicity area was very important, the Carbide Courier for example was, you know, they started a local newspaper, I forget what it was called. But all those activities, and those were controlled by the Army weren���t they? To some degree.
Mrs. Jernigan: Certainly the plants.
Mr. Kolb: You couldn’t say certain things and you couldn’t report on certain other things.
Mrs. Jernigan: Certainly the plant newspaper, which had to – we had to – there was a censorship group, but I don’t remember exactly what they were called when it was part of security – that we had to pass everything through them.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, before it got printed.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, I don’t know how my book review of the The Yogi and the Commissar got past them, but it was innocent on my part, you know. It was a good book and it was what I had to read that week. But the newspaper – The Oak Ridge Journal was the early newspaper. McCarthy, with whom I worked at K-25, left to be the editor of that newspaper, which didn’t – or maybe the successor to that newspaper. There was an Oak Ridge something else, but that didn’t last long. It didn’t make it, and then the Oak Ridger came along, with young Dick Smyser and I applied for a job there as women’s page editor and got it, but they were going to pay me thirty dollars a week and –
Mr. Kolb: Full-time? Was it full-time employment?
Mrs. Jernigan: Full-time employment, and I just couldn’t do it, and Dick teases me about that still and tells everybody that I –
Mr. Kolb: You couldn’t do it.
Mrs. Jernigan: Well, I meant that there was less money than I thought I deserved, was worth, so I didn’t take the job with the Oak Ridger at that time. Later on, I worked for the Oak Ridger, in more recent years, as a reporter and founded that – Mary Smyser and I founded the Incky column. We were the first Inckies.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, good for you. Your idea, kind of? Your idea to have it?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah we set the policy and decided how we wanted to do it and –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, what was the – I’ve heard that. What was the original idea behind it? What kind of questions were you trying to solve?
Mrs. Jernigan: Well the little symbol for Incky and the funny spelling of it came out of the Incorporation Movement.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: At the time there was a move to incorporate, the paper instituted a question and answer column that they called Incky for – short for incorporation, and had this little figure, this little atomic figure, and so when we revived – when Dick and Tom Hill wanted to revive the column as an action mind, citizen action mind column, which many newspapers have, they decided to use that same little Incky symbol.
Mr. Kolb: Incky, yeah, I didn’t know that. I’d never heard that, incorporation. That’s a connection.
Mrs. Jernigan: Spelled I-N-C-K-Y. That’s where that came from.
Mr. Kolb: It’s a piece of history that, you know, is different, yeah, right, and you were involved in doing the Incky column with Mrs. Smyser?
Mrs. Jernigan: Uh-hunh. We did it on our dining – we did it from home. We took the questions and we’d be at her house one week and mine the next, and we’d divvy up the questions and we were anonymous. Nobody knew who we are, who Incky is, and still – I think that’s still a policy of the paper, that not many people know who writes the Incky column, because you’d be beset with people talking to you about it.
Mr. Kolb: That’s for sure, yeah, wouldn’t want your phone ringing: “Why didn’t you get my question in there this week?” or whatever.
Mrs. Jernigan: Exactly.
Mr. Kolb: But okay, let’s go with the second most unique experience or atmosphere or what you want to recall about Oak Ridge. Your first one was very good, of course. Is there an early Oak Ridge attitude, or whatever you want to call it, from the WWII era that maybe stands out in your mind?
Mrs. Jernigan: I guess the youthfulness and the energy.
Mr. Kolb: Vigor, yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: The physical energy and excitement. There was still a lot of excitement in people when, back in those days, and I believe that the period when I lived in the “D” house was, for me, the most fulfilling or exciting time.
Mr. Kolb: You involved with so many people.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Five roommates or housemates and something going on all the time I bet. Did you have phones then, back then?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, we had a phone.
Mr. Kolb: You did?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes. In the dorms, I think there was a – I think you had to go down to the lobby, as I recall, to use the phone. There were desk clerks there, but I think the only phone was in the lobby. But we had a phone in the “D” house.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, I wasn’t sure, but I know that, now, there was a period when there was work phones and they got [inaudible].
Mrs. Jernigan: So I guess that period would be the most – and work was interesting. Everything was – the high level of interest in each other and community life and so much to do. Of course, there’s still so much to do.
Mr. Kolb: But there was a period, you know, right after the war when no one knew whether the town was going to survive, and a lot of uncertainty, too, until the government, the Washington people, decided, well this was an asset, don’t want to let go of it.
Mrs. Jernigan: There’s a lot of talk about that. And I know, everybody said, you know, like they’d say, “When we leave,” or “If this town survives,” or – there was that sort of uncertainty.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, until things got sort of on the map, you might say.
Mrs. Jernigan: Right.
Mr. Kolb: But there’s no promise that this is going to make it, ’cause there’s no –
Mrs. Jernigan: And lots of people did leave and go back to their jobs.
Mr. Kolb: In fact most of them did; more left than stayed.
Mrs. Jernigan: Of course, of course.
Mr. Kolb: You met people and a year later they were gone, two years later they were gone, the job ended and that was that.
Mrs. Jernigan: They left.
Mr. Kolb: So, but, a passing fancy, almost.
Mrs. Jernigan: And perhaps that was part of the excitement, the immediacy lent excitement, because people didn’t know whether it would be permanent or it was lifetime. Eat, drink, and be merry.
Mr. Kolb: That’s right. Who knows? Well, it was wartime; the psychology was different too.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Willing to do without and willing to, but –
Mrs. Jernigan: I’m sure somebody’s described to you – I can’t because I was not a customer – but about the bootlegging that went on.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve never heard that discussed, I mean.
Mrs. Jernigan: I don’t know it firsthand, but apparently –
Mr. Kolb: During wartime, I mean, I knew it went on, but I can’t remember it myself. But it didn’t ever involve me, but I’m sure it was part of – well, there was bootlegging done by officials too – the famous – his name was – got arrested flying in from somewhere. Murray, John Murray, head of Y-12? This was after the war.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, okay.
Mr. Kolb: He was carrying back stuff in his suitcases. He was arrested. It was big news.
Mrs. Jernigan: I don’t remember that.
Mr. Kolb: It was kind of taken for granted, I guess, these guys would do it, and he got nabbed. I guess they figured once too often or something like that, but it was kind of a particular thing. He didn’t do any time, of course, but somebody paid a fine.
Mrs. Jernigan: That was a big adventure, you know, going to Oakdale or going to Chattanooga. Oakdale had stores for a while, liquor stores.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, really?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: My goodness, was Roane County a dry county?
Mrs. Jernigan: It’s Morgan County.
Mr. Kolb: It’s Morgan County.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Was a wet county?
Mrs. Jernigan: Wet for about one year, I think, and during that time, Oak Ridgers had a steady beat.
Mr. Kolb: So the bootleggers lost out then for a while.
Mrs. Jernigan: Except some people didn’t want to drive up there.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, bootleggers made home delivery right?
Mrs. Jernigan: That’s what I understand.
Mr. Kolb: That’s what they say, yeah, one of the features, yeah. And there was plenty of drinking going on, partying, I guess, plenty of parties and the young people, yeah. Beer and liquor were part of the scene, I’m sure. And I’m sure there was a little drunkenness going on too.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, I don’t remember much drunkenness. I do remember that in the early days at the tennis court dances, there was reportedly a murder there one night.
Mr. Kolb: During the dance?
Mrs. Jernigan: During the dance, but it was – of course it was not in the papers, and after that we all began to talk about how probably a lot of bad things went on here, but it wouldn’t be publicized. So then we got a little paranoid about that, you know, how much crime was going on that wasn’t being talked about. And this legend of the murder at the tennis court dance prevailed for some time. It was supposedly out, somebody out, just outside the fence or something.
Mr. Kolb: I see, someone got in an argument and pulled a knife or who knows what.
Mrs. Jernigan: Something, and maybe it didn’t happen, you know, but that was the rumor.
Mr. Kolb: This was a rumor, but it was never – okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: Sort of a strong rumor.
Mr. Kolb: I’d never heard that.
Mrs. Jernigan: And security controlled the press with such, that you would never hear, and actually I think that – not controlled the press, but the press early – and by the press I mean the Oak Ridger – was very careful about ever criticizing DOE or its predecessors. Now it’s wide open, fair game, but in those days you just didn’t, you just didn’t do that, and I think that’s kind of a carryover from the censorship of the war days.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you were totally dependent on the government then. There was no private industry here then, basically, so it was totally a kept town. So why bite the arm, the hand, the everything that feeds you? You better – you may not like it, but you just don’t talk about it, you know. Was there anything I’ve missed that we should talk about? I mean that you want to add or – I don’t want to put words in your mouth, of course, but in terms of your own experiences that you might think was unique.
Mrs. Jernigan: I don’t, I don’t think of anything. Jim, I think you’ve asked some good questions and made me think about the unique experiences which I’ve discussed and particularly in regard to the Happy Valley experience, it seems like a dream. And there have been times when I’ve told people about this, that I’ve felt like I was making it up. I’d think, this happened, you know, but I’m not making it up, but it has a dreamlike sort of character in my memory.
Mr. Kolb: You know, you’re not the only one that I’ve heard this kind of feeling about. In fact, when I came here in ’54, Happy Valley physically was gone, and I never even knew about it until about a year ago. I mean I’ve heard the word but, you know, I thought it was some name of a valley out there, you know, a physical valley. And I couldn’t believe when they said there was twelve thousand people living that were out there; everything was there. Where was it, you know? Well, you can find tracks here and there, but, you know, it’s gone by now. When did they knock the buildings down, do you recall?
Mrs. Jernigan: Well they must have knocked them down during the nine month period when I was back in school after nineteen – it must have been 1944 and ’45, because when I came back, they were gone.
Mr. Kolb: Oh the buildings were gone too? I’m talking about the buildings being removed.
Mrs. Jernigan: The construction – I mean the theater and the grocery store, yeah, yeah, they were gone.
Mr. Kolb: But the barracks and everything?
Mrs. Jernigan: Barracks and everything.
Mr. Kolb: Everything, oh, see, I didn’t know when that happened. I knew it was gone when I came in ’54, I mean it was no trace.
Mrs. Jernigan: I think it was gone within a year’s time, maybe less.
Mr. Kolb: So it was built up in probably ’43, ’44, and gone by ’45.
Mrs. Jernigan: I believe so.
Mr. Kolb: Late ’45 or ’46.
Mrs. Jernigan: There may have been some, some of the old ones on the – of course it was all on the opposite side of the highway from the plant buildings. There may have been some residual stuff over there, but I think the barracks were all gone. I know they were all gone.
Mr. Kolb: Well, let me ask about this out there. Did you have any interaction with the Wheat community people or, let’s see, the old, I guess it was the Wheat Church and there’s the Wheat School? There was a real community out there right nearby.
Mrs. Jernigan: No, I saw it as I went by, but no. I’m sure that Colleen must have described that to you ’cause I think maybe there were – I think that the school – I don’t know whether they –
Mr. Kolb: I don’t know what happened to that school, whether they kept it going. It was an elementary and a high school, both, and I don’t know what happened. I suspect that the people, it had to be, were part of those that were moved out, so that, you know, I suspect that all shut down.
Mrs. Jernigan: I think so.
Mr. Kolb: And so – but before the war, it was a very active community and they still have reunions every year.
Mrs. Jernigan: There’s a – have you seen any of the books that have come out of Clinton?
Mr. Kolb: I’m going to stop.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Well, Helen, thank you. This has been very interesting, and we leave it go at that for now. Thank you.
[end of recording]

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

ORAL HISTORY OF HELEN JERNIGAN
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
March 27, 2002
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Helen, let’s start off first by having you tell us a little bit of background of where you were before you came to Oak Ridge and then why and how you came to Oak Ridge, okay?
Mrs. Jernigan: Okay. I was just finishing a year of college at Tennessee Wesleyan College and went home for the summer with no plans, no job, just glad to be out of school.
Mr. Kolb: When was this?
Mrs. Jernigan: This was in 1944, I guess. I’m not too good with dates for these things, forty – ’44, yes, the summer of ’44. And I went back home and reconnected with some of my friends there who were – some of whom were still in high school. And at this high school where I went, Pleasant Hill Academy, we had an interest there in preserving folklore and we did folk dancing and we traveled with these folk dances. We went to New York and Chicago, and it was a church school, congregational church, and this is one way they raised money for the school, by taking us to show off the children in school.
Mr. Kolb: Still do that today.
Mrs. Jernigan: Right. So they had been invited to come to Clinton. They told me to perform at a place in Clinton and they didn’t know much more than that about it, but it was at a theater and they wanted me to come along to play the piano for this folk dancing that they were going to do. So I did, and it turned out to be in Happy Valley, the construction site of K-25.
Mr. Kolb: Inside the project.
Mrs. Jernigan: Inside the plant. And on the stage with us were some other notables, Sam McGhee, Sam and Kirk McGhee of Grand Ole Opry stars and some other country music sort of things. And these dances of ours at Pleasant Hill Academy were mostly English country dances. They weren’t square dances. At any rate, we had this performance, and the man who owned the theater where we performed after the show asked –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, there was a theater out there?
Mrs. Jernigan: Oh, yes, I’ll tell you about that.
Mr. Kolb: This is an indoor theater performance.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: And he asked me if I’d like a job, and I said, “Sure.” So he said he needed a bookkeeper, and I didn’t know anything about bookkeeping, but I was too young and brash to know that I didn’t. So I went home and got my things and went back to Happy Valley to work for Mr. Rue.
Mr. Kolb: And this is in the summer.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, this was in the summer, and he had a group of young people there that he brought from Franklin, Tennessee where he came from. He had a theater, a bowling alley, a duck pin alley and a large recreation complex that he called Coney Island where there were games and basketball hoops and like a carnival sort of thing, like an arcade where you shop for things and you got prizes, and the prizes were mostly cigarettes.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is this in Happy Valley?
Mrs. Jernigan: Happy Valley.
Mr. Kolb: This Coney Island was in Happy Valley?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes. Also there was a supermarket, a bank, everything you needed was there.
Mr. Kolb: School?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, I don’t know; that I don’t know. I know that my next door neighbor, Jo Ellen Iacovino, who is Colleen Black’s sister, was a child there with her family and she went to a nursery school and they thought – they called it ‘Nazi school,’ and they thought that just beyond the fence was Germans, when they were little and lived in Happy Valley. But we were self-sufficient there, and I’d been there a short time I guess when I learned that there was a place called Townsite which was kind of a total mystery to us.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, and how long was that before you knew about Townsite?
Mrs. Jernigan: Well not too long, a couple of weeks I guess. I lived in a barracks there; they called them barracks. They were H-shaped dormitories like now, but they called them barracks and my barracks, men lived in one wing and women in the other. There were no locks, we had no keys for the door, and nobody stole anything that I recall. But of course, security – there was lots of security. And –
Mr. Kolb: Army security?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, yes and there was some, I’m sure Army security, and it was, I’ve written about this before, but you couldn’t tell night from day because they worked ’round the clock, you know, and there were big flood lights everywhere, so –
Mr. Kolb: Ok, in the middle of the night it was light?
Mrs. Jernigan: Right and music going from loud speakers night and day.
Mr. Kolb: I never heard that. Really?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Is that part of Bill Pollock’s operation?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, no, it was some pre-Pollock operation, but I remember Josephine, the tune Josephine over and over. You know they had – it was like Musak: there were about five numbers, all of which I happened to like. It was okay.
Mr. Kolb: I’m going to stop a minute.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: And I had, I don’t think I had a roommate there. Well I went back to college, and sort of kept the books for Mr. Rue.
Mr. Kolb: While you were in school?
Mrs. Jernigan: No. I’m backing up now to the summer. I never said anything about my job, but what I would do is do some books and record keeping for him in the afternoon and then at night I would help the other kids with the shooting galleries and the prizes and all that stuff. We had some things –
Mr. Kolb: Run the operations.
Mrs. Jernigan: Right. Now, we had some prizes besides the cigarettes. We had these little figurines that glowed in the dark, and when I wrote about this for Jim Overholt and the Children’s Museum, he took that out; he thought there was something spooky and irradiated about those. I don’t know what it was. You probably know.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, it’s a fluorescence material, yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: They fluoresced. Anyway, I went back to school and this was like I’d made it up. I mean, I would tell people where I was in the summer, “I was in Clinton.” I never, still never used the word Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Had you been to Townsite?
Mrs. Jernigan: I’d been to Townsite. Once in a while we would go into Townsite. No particular reason to, ’cause we had dances on Friday and Saturday night, live bands down at K, down at Happy Valley. It was totally a self-contained little town down there. And so we rarely went to Townsite, but there was a – I think a department store, clothing store that provided more than we had in Happy Valley. I’m not sure we had clothing.
Mr. Kolb: Was there a Loveman’s in Oak Ridge, in town?
Mrs. Jernigan: It may have been Loveman’s, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: But you had groceries and shopping for groceries and normal things in Happy Valley?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, and some clothing and banks and, you know, everything. And we were paid by J. A. Jones & Company. Everybody who worked there was paid by Jones, and of course there were many, many people working and living there and bused in there. And the funny thing, transportation throughout my early years in Oak Ridge – transportation was so automatic because it was so plentiful. I mean you just hopped on a bus and you went to Knoxville. You hopped on a bus and went anywhere, so much so that I don’t remember much of it. It was like brushing your teeth.
Mr. Kolb: You took it for granted.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, and sometimes when I think back about going to Knoxville or going to Clinton or something, I think, “How did I get there?” And I don’t know how I got there; the bus went there.
Mr. Kolb: And you never had to – did you have to pay for any of the buses?
Mrs. Jernigan: Not in the very early days you didn’t.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I meant, yeah. Even to Knoxville, you could go free?
Mrs. Jernigan: I think so. I believe so. I’m not sure, clear about that.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, it wasn’t very much, anyway.
Mrs. Jernigan: No, minimal if anything. And then when – next summer I came back and got a job.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and you graduated.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, and my dad had insisted that I take a typing course, which did not suit me, but I did, thank goodness, because it was the only tool I had; being a music major didn’t qualify me. And I typed very poorly, so that’s an indication of how easy it was to get a job here. You know, you just came here, you got a job.
Mr. Kolb: Well the fact that you worked the previous summer helped you probably, I would think.
Mrs. Jernigan: What?
Mr. Kolb: The fact that you’d worked the previous summer, some, maybe helped you get on.
Mrs. Jernigan: I doubt it. I think they just were hiring everybody.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and this is the summer of ’45?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, you just, you knew when you went in the employment office in Knoxville that you were going to get a job. And I really did not type well at all. I got a job in the Labor Relations Department at K-25 with Union Carbide doing applications for deferment of people that were there –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, Selective Service.
Mrs. Jernigan: – working and had to continually be deferred, and I did this for a little while, and in the same department was the Recreation Department and Thomas Francis Xavier McCarthy was the editor of the Carbide Courier and he shared the office – we were all – the Labor Relations and Recreation and the Carbide Courier were all in the same office, big office.
Mr. Kolb: Did you live at Happy Valley, still, then?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, no, at that time I lived in a dormitory in Oak Ridge, and Happy Valley was gone, you know. I mean, K-25 was there, the big buildings, the big buildings, but there was –
Mr. Kolb: The construction was over?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Basically?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. In one year.
Mrs. Jernigan: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: But the buildings were still there were they not?
Mrs. Jernigan: The buildings were there, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, but the town, workforce had been –
Mrs. Jernigan: The town, the workforce was, you know, the provisions and housing and all that from the workforce was gone just like it had never been. It was weird.
Mr. Kolb: By ’45?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So the construction of the K-25 building was finished and the big push of construction was over, and so you lived in Townsite, okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: And –
Mr. Kolb: So who did you live with then, in Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Jernigan: Random, random roommates. They just assigned you to a room and there was a roommate, and I remember living with – one of my roommates was secretary at the Chapel on the Hill. She was the church secretary, and a couple of them – I don’t know why I kept moving around; it’s not clear to me why I moved to other dormitories, but the ones in West Village were not quite as desirable as the ones in Townsite.
Mr. Kolb: Is that where you were, West Village?
Mrs. Jernigan: I lived in West Village first, so maybe that’s why I moved. I wanted to be closer to town. I don’t remember. And then I remember living with a shift worker for a while who would be sleeping when I wasn’t, but we always got along very well. I liked them all, and no problem. And then I managed to move to get for my roommate a girl that had been my little sister in college. We had this big and little sister system. And she and I then roomed together for –
Mr. Kolb: Who was that?
Mrs. Jernigan: Helen Watts, and she got married and was Helen Hopkins and now lives in Ohio. And that was nice. I liked all, all my roommates, and with it, for recreation – the reason – I’m going to go back for a minute to my work in the Labor Relations Department and all that; didn’t last long because of McCarthy, Tommy McCarthy. Tommy McCarthy was a little guy from New York City who was the editor of the Carbide Courier and later came to work for ORAU in public relations there. He was a character and you’ll hear about him from other people I’m sure, but he leant me books. I was a veracious reader in those days. He leant me books and asked me to do book reviews for the Carbide Courier, which I did, and he liked my writing, so he made me his associate editor, and I did that, then, the rest of my stay, rest of my employment with Union Carbide and –
Mr. Kolb: So you got your writing career started in that way.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes and I had been – had a minor in English, so that suited me and that’s what I did.
Mr. Kolb: And about how long did that last, do you know?
Mrs. Jernigan: Two to three years.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, after the war, probably.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes and I’d have to look at my thing that I filled out for you to see what I did next, but as far as recreation, there were music groups that interested me most of all. There were music listening groups and we had, McCarthy had. He was a jazz aficionado and Clark Center, who was the head guy at K-25, had played in a jazz group at one time, and so that got to – the jazz group was interesting. We’d just go listen to recorded jazz.
Mr. Kolb: These were local people that played together?
Mrs. Jernigan: No this, we just listened to recorded –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, listened, listened, okay, okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: Recorded jazz. No, they didn’t, none of them, I don’t think, at that time played, but they were just appreciators of jazz.
Mr. Kolb: Where did you do this?
Mrs. Jernigan: In people’s homes, but then there was a music appreciation group that met in Ridge Rec Hall, and then there was the early – pretty early on there was the Community Chorus, which I sang with, and so very early music was part of recreation for me.
Mr. Kolb: Who directed that chorus? Do you remember that?
Mrs. Jernigan: Almost, well, Harry Carper did, for one.
Mr. Kolb: I interviewed him and he referred to being a director, yeah, I think you’re right. I think I know you’re right.
Mrs. Jernigan: He did.
Mr. Kolb: He was at Chapel on the Hill, I think.
Mrs. Jernigan: I believe so.
Mr. Kolb: That’s right.
Mrs. Jernigan: He may have directed there, that church choir, later on, but this was a community group.
Mr. Kolb: And probably started about the same time as the symphony maybe or the orchestra, whatever it was called?
Mrs. Jernigan: I think so, I believe so.
Mr. Kolb: About ’44 or ’43 or ’44, somewhere in there? So your music – you did get [to use] some of your music appreciation.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, did get to use it.
Mr. Kolb: Was singing your – did you play the piano? Or did you –
Mrs. Jernigan: Played piano.
Mr. Kolb: And you sang partly, your, you know –
Mrs. Jernigan: Some. You sing in the choir don’t you?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, my wife and I both do, and we’re just average, you know, you just –
Mrs. Jernigan: But it’s fun.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, you’re right. So music, you had fulfillment you might say in your musical desires that way, and I assume there were lots of people like that.
Mrs. Jernigan: Oh yes.
Mr. Kolb: I mean, that jazz grew, how big a number you talking about?
Mrs. Jernigan: Well the jazz group wasn’t very big. It was maybe ten people and very loosely – it wasn’t organized, you know. We’d just go over to somebody’s house if they had a record, and then I got to know Horace Sarudy and Bill Pollock early on, and through them Ed Westcott, so I knew –
Mr. Kolb: Was that in the Jazz group?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, I just – musically, because Westcott and Sarudy had grown up together. They were little boys in Nashville together. They were old friends.
Mr. Kolb: I heard they were good friends, I didn’t know they were children –
Mrs. Jernigan: Children together.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I didn’t know that, ’cause I knew Horace when he worked at Music Box, bought some stuff from him, like we all did. From Music Box – that was it. And, well, did you like to dance? I mean there were a lot of dances going on every weekend.
Mrs. Jernigan: Oh yes, yes, oh, every – twice a week, Wednesday nights – it seems like Wednesday night, I don’t know, some week night, and Saturday night, the tennis court dances or the – in the Ridge Rec Hall, and then they – so, danced all the time with everyone.
Mr. Kolb: Is that where you met your first husband?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, I met him folk dancing.
Mr. Kolb: Folk dancing. Well, that’s a form of dancing.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes. By this time, I lived in a house with five other women.
Mr. Kolb: “D” house?
Mrs. Jernigan: A “D” house on Taylor Road, and at the Elm Grove School, which was just down the block, not even a block away from where I lived, they had regular weekly folk dancing, so I was delighted to find that there, out of which came out of my Pleasantville Academy experience, so I went to those and that’s where I met Ed.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. I’d never heard about the folk dancing. Now who led that? I mean, was that kind of just an interest group too or –
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes and the McCallans, Helen and Hank McCallan, and Ken and Helen Warren, I think, were in that group, and let’s see –
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I know of the McCallan’s. Are they still around?
Mrs. Jernigan: I think that folk dance group may be still alive.
Mr. Kolb: There is a folk dance group, yeah you’re right.
Mrs. Jernigan: I think it’s the same, I believe its root –
Mr. Kolb: Continuing.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, has survived.
Mr. Kolb: Well that was an early, early activity, yeah. In fact there’s even something called the International Dance group, maybe even.
Mrs. Jernigan: Something.
Mr. Kolb: They go beyond American dances, maybe.
Mrs. Jernigan: This group did too, and I don’t remember who was the leader or whether they took turns. I didn’t go.
Mr. Kolb: This is a grassroots movement basically.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, sprang up.
Mr. Kolb: And how big, how many people were involved in that roughly?
Mrs. Jernigan: Quite a few, I’d say maybe thirty with Gilpatricks. That’s where I met them first.
Mr. Kolb: Were they married then?
Mrs. Jernigan: I’m not sure. I believe they were, but I’m not sure.
Mr. Kolb: So, now, when you lived on Taylor Road, did you do your own cooking? Did you go to the cafeterias?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes we did our – oh, we took great pride in doing our own cooking. We –
Mr. Kolb: You gals that lived together.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, we had – we were very organized. We had one night each week that we cooked, and we – the Elm Grove Grocery Store was just across the street from us, so we got our provisions there. We pooled our money; we were organized. And we had a lot of parties. We, there were a lot of young men in “D” houses and there were sort of a “D” house culture, you know. We all knew each other as – we who lived in “D” houses were usually acquainted with each other and –
Mr. Kolb: Just from your area, ’cause there were lots of these “D” houses, groups, you mean, other places in town?
Mrs. Jernigan: Right, we didn’t – no not necessarily from our area. There was one, particularly one that we were close, perhaps closer to on – I remember it was at 215 East Tennessee Avenue. I know it’s the corner of Tennessee and Florida, that we knew, those guys, you know, were kind of our buddies.
Mr. Kolb: “D” house culture, that’s a good way to put it. You shared a lot of things in other words, maybe even stockings, you know, in a pinch, right?
Mrs. Jernigan: And then one of my roommates, Elsie Burton Hockey, somehow she was, she worked in travel at K-25 and she had something to do with the arrival of the MIT practice school fellows, and she used to bring them by in waves when they would come, and they would drink up all our coffee and talk and argue, and so we had, we ran sort of a coffee house there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, in your apartment, you mean?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, this was in the “D” house.
Mr. Kolb: In the “D” house, that’s what I meant, yeah in the “D” house, yeah, okay. Kind of a welcome center, right? Maybe of sorts? Of course those guys were living in another – probably lived in dorms, I imagine.
Mrs. Jernigan: I don’t know where they lived. I think they lived in dorms, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: But did you ever go to the cafeterias, like on weekends, or, you know, eat out?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, well, when, when I, before I moved to the house, when I lived in dormitories, I ate at the cafeteria all the time.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, which one? T&C?
Mrs. Jernigan: Central.
Mr. Kolb: Central, right by Jackson Square?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Did it become T&C later on?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause I ate there a lot.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, right below, and that was called Central Cafeteria.
Mrs. Jernigan: Right, and then at West Village there was a cafeteria – Jefferson, I guess, it was called, but – and it seems to me they had pretty good food. I don’t remember not liking it or complaining. And I must have eaten two meals a day there, because we did not cook in the dormitory.
Mr. Kolb: Oh that’s right, yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: We didn’t have, maybe we weren’t allowed to, but we didn’t even have hotplates in the dorm.
Mr. Kolb: You weren’t supposed to, at least. But there was a lot of activity going on in town.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, and everybody was young.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: You know that, and I remember thinking, even back then, I remember thinking, one of these days we’re going to be like St. Petersburg, we’re going to all be old at the same time.
Mr. Kolb: Sure enough it has happened. More or less, yeah. Well, Helen, tell me a little bit more about your Carbide employment then, what you were doing, okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: Okay. We printed the Carbide Courier in Knoxville ’cause there was no printing facility in Oak Ridge, so we would write the material for it and make pictures and all and take it into Knoxville where – to a printing place on North Central, and they did the old fashioned typesetting thing and layout. They did the layout for us. We would have a mockup of the layout. But I did several features and whatever needed to be done. There were only two of us, but one of the things that I enjoyed most was that we had a column called ‘The Carbide Lamp,’ in which we profiled people who worked at K-25, and Tommy McCarthy had been doing that until the time that I started to work for the Courier, and he’d only done the brass. He’d started with Clark Center and he was working his way down, and my first person to interview was Paul Huber, and he was very charming and easy to interview, and then I got a bee in my bonnet about democratizing it and writing about everybody at all levels of employment, so I was pleased that they let me do that, and continued to do that throughout my work there.
Mr. Kolb: So you went beyond your musical reviews that you started out and you went broader into everything.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes and we had feature articles, you know. We would write about the Power House one week and we would – news, if there was news, and we had music reviews and book reviews and –
Mr. Kolb: Did you still do book reviews in addition to your other assignments?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, still did those, right, and whatever needed to be done. I even did sports sometimes.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness. Now were there other – I’ve heard about the Carbide News, but there were other contractors here? Carbide just ran K-25, right?
Mrs. Jernigan: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Originally.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Were there other contractor papers in town at the time?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, Y-12 had a paper and the editor was a man named George Dobbs and it may have even preceded the Carbide Courier, and we had a loose connection, us editors. And at X-10, Mark – a man named Mark Sims was the editor, and I worked there briefly, for the ORNL News. And then I had surgery; I had a ruptured disk and had to have surgery and had to be out for about [a] month and –
Mr. Kolb: Just too much dancing or what?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, actually I had gone for a long motorcycle ride with Ed Fairstein, and that’s what had happened.
Mr. Kolb: A rough ride, probably.
Mrs. Jernigan: So my – I still rode with him after that, after I had a fusion, but I had to stop – I thought I had to quit my job at ORNL News, although they didn’t suggest that. I thought if I was going to – they had just started it; it was just in the formative period where we were deciding policy and talking to people and getting connected with people, and I thought it was too burdensome for the editor to have to do alone, and that he needed to get somebody healthy and who was coming to work right away, so I resigned from that against his wishes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, ’cause you had, you had a good experience in the other paper, that you brought with you.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: And that’s why you wanted to have, well what time, what year is this about?
Mrs. Jernigan: Let’s see, I’m not sure. All of this happened rather quickly it seems to me. This must have been about 1948, or something like that.
Mr. Kolb: So you went from Carbide Courier to the ORNL News?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, and I didn’t even put that in here, it was so brief, but it was 1948. And then after I recovered from this –
Mr. Kolb: And you were still single then?
Mrs. Jernigan: Un-huhn. After I recovered from this surgery, I went to work for Bush Building Company, who constructed the Garden Apartments, as their office manager. And then, that’s when I got – while I was working there, I married, and after that, it looks like I couldn’t hold a job.
Mr. Kolb: You just had a storied career. Bounced from one thing to another just looking for something you really –
Mrs. Jernigan: And learned something from every one of them, as you know.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, right. So you were an office manager of the apartments, Garden Apartments?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, the construction.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, construction.
Mrs. Jernigan: It was the construction. As a matter of fact, Bush Building Company did the water and sewer lines. They were a Nashville company and they all lived in Nashville, and, I mean, they all lived here during the week in hotels or dormitories or something. And there were a hundred, about a hundred men employed here, and their supervisory personnel all came from Nashville every Monday morning and went back to Nashville every Friday afternoon. And our offices were with the main contractor who was Merritt, Chapman & Scott down in West Village.
Mr. Kolb: I see. Well, after they were built, then, did you stay on with that company?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, they finished the job, and then I went to work for Dr. Williams and Dr. Helm at the Medical Arts building, old, old, Medical Arts building, and met – Dr. Williams was the general practitioner, Dr. Helm was a surgeon, and they – Dr. Williams left to go to Harlan, Kentucky, where he finished his career, because he wanted to help people, poor people, and Dr. Helm, I don’t know what happened to him, but he – I worked for them until my first child was born.
Mr. Kolb: But how did you get into the medical, I mean, were they advertising for a person or did you know somebody who knew them?
Mrs. Jernigan: I knew somebody who was their office manager and she stopped to have a child or something and she told me that she –
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and you heard about the vacancy.
Mrs. Jernigan: Had heard about the vacancy, just about the time that the work on the Garden Apartments ended, so I just –
Mr. Kolb: And they finally ��� there was nothing you couldn’t do, so they just hired you.
Mrs. Jernigan: Nothing I wouldn’t try, let’s put it that way.
Mr. Kolb: So you were married by that time?
Mrs. Jernigan: I think, yes, married and worked there till I had my first child. In fact, the doctors supplied formula and they supplied everything I possibly needed.
Mr. Kolb: Is that your last full time occupation, or you went back to work for the Oak Ridger at one point.
Mrs. Jernigan: Oh yes, I worked for the Oak Ridger then.
Mr. Kolb: I think you took some years off.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Kind of raising your family for a while.
Mrs. Jernigan: Right. During that time – I didn’t mention that on here, but when my children were small I gave piano lessons for a while.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, you got back in your musical venue.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, for a few years. It was sort of on the barter system. I gave lessons to a women who did alterations for me, you know, we exchanged things, and a neighbor’s child; I had about six students, something like that.
Mr. Kolb: Friends, kind of, probably.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Was Mrs. Varagona teaching then? You know, she taught forever, she still is, but that’s probably before her time.
Mrs. Jernigan: No I don’t think so. I think that was before her time.
Mr. Kolb: My daughters took from her. Let’s go back a little bit. I think we’ve covered your employment pretty well. Let’s go back a little bit to what it was like when the war ended and when the bomb was dropped in Oak Ridge. What was the feeling, and what was your experience?
Mrs. Jernigan: That was just very, very, of course, very exciting. I remember we would – when we’d gather to celebrate this – and I’m not sure where we gathered – but there was an enormous crowd of us, and when I see the – the picture, the old picture, photograph that shows the war –
Mr. Kolb: Was that a spontaneous gathering or what?
Mrs. Jernigan: Well, it – no, it wasn’t spontaneous, but I don’t recall how we knew about it. It was like a – whether announcements were made at work, or how we knew to gather, and I don’t even remember where we gathered, but it seems to me it was outside.
Mr. Kolb: Well, Ed Westcott’s famous picture of that gathering, I suspect it may have been Townsite but I’m not sure.
Mrs. Jernigan: It may well have been, yes, but it was very exciting and it’s just incredible that none of us knew, I mean that so few of us knew.
Mr. Kolb: Did you hear any rumors, I mean did you –
Mrs. Jernigan: Not one.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause you weren’t supposed to, but, you know.
Mrs. Jernigan: No, the general conversation was that we were making something for the war effort.
Mr. Kolb: Right, yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: And I had a general feeling that it might be some sort of weapons, but I didn’t think it was any kind of new and strange weapons.
Mr. Kolb: Oh I see, like it was.
Mrs. Jernigan: No, I thought it [was] just ordinary weapons that I – that were – that I knew about, you know, I thought maybe just a lot of those.
Mr. Kolb: Right.
Mrs. Jernigan: Maybe just an enormous quantity of the conventional weapons.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve heard that there was a rumor that there was some sort of artillery operation going on in Oak Ridge. This was maybe from outsiders trying to guess what was going on inside the project. That was one of the guesses, you know. That was wrong, but looking at – it was unconventional, but you know that was just somebody just guessing, you know, but anyway. So how long did this party go on? I mean, did it start in the morning or was it –
Mrs. Jernigan: I don’t remember, Jim. I remember just being very excited and other people going from the dormitory or whatever and I don’t remember a whole lot of it.
Mr. Kolb: Were you in the dorm then?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: In West Village and that’s why I thought that there was something in West Village, but there may not have been.
Mr. Kolb: Maybe there were several different parties.
Mrs. Jernigan: There may have been, that’s possible, but the odd thing is, really, to me, is the fact that even among intimate conversations with people, there was no speculation expressed. You would think that people sitting down in the privacy of their homes or their dates or whatever would say, “What do you really – what do you think we’re doing here?” That didn’t happen. We never talked about it, never.
Mr. Kolb: At least among the people you were –
Mrs. Jernigan: That I associated with.
Mr. Kolb: Right.
Mrs. Jernigan: They would – you’d talk about when you were supposed to go to work and what the work schedule was and where you worked but no speculation about what we were doing even among trusted people in private conversation.
Mr. Kolb: Right, yeah. So the prohibition against security talk was really – but did you see any evidence of people that were checking up on people in town ever?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Were there many?
Mrs. Jernigan: Not in Oak Ridge proper, but when I lived at K-25, in Happy Valley, there was one amusing incident. I had invited some college friends to come, couple of girls, maybe three to come and spend the weekend with me. And I got passes for them –
Mr. Kolb: Really, you could get passes?
Mrs. Jernigan: Got passes and all that, and they came, and I didn’t have enough beds, I think I had two beds, so I borrowed mattresses from some women who were going away for the weekend or something in the dormitory, and we put those in the room. And on Monday morning, early, after the girls had gone back home and I was about to take the mattresses back, the FBI came calling on me and they said that I had removed government property.
Mr. Kolb: Which I guess you had.
Mrs. Jernigan: Right.
Mr. Kolb: You had moved it. You hadn’t removed it; you just moved it.
Mrs. Jernigan: Right, I’d moved it. I had to explain that I was going to put it back, in fact had to put it back before somebody came back who had needed it, but the alacrity with which they responded to that made me know that something –
Mr. Kolb: Big brother was out there, kind of.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes. And once I got called in at K-25 and warned that they might look upon me as a security risk because I forgot my badge so many times. I was pretty airy fairy about that badge, and I would show up at work and have to get a temporary pass and all, and then that wasn’t all they had on my record. It turned out I had reviewed a book that they didn’t like. Wasn’t my fault; it was one that McCarthy had leant me. But it was The Yogi and the Commissar and it was about Communism and they didn’t like that at all.
Mr. Kolb: So they were watching you, right? Sounds like it, a little bit.
Mrs. Jernigan: They were.
Mr. Kolb: Of course you were writing copy, so you were –
Mrs. Jernigan: And then they also pointed out to me that they had observed me sitting on the grass with a photographer for our newsletter and blowing on blades of grass out in the lawn, you know, when we should have been working.
Mr. Kolb: Oh my goodness, so obviously they were following –
Mrs. Jernigan: They were.
Mr. Kolb: Kind of checking up on people.
Mrs. Jernigan: And there was an old Irish cop named McCarthy, named Mc – what, I don’t know. He had an Irish name and he had come out of the New York PD and was tough as nails on security down there. Everybody was scared to death of him.
Mr. Kolb: Was he FBI do you think?
Mrs. Jernigan: Wasn’t FBI, I don’t think. He was just a cop, but he was the big cop at K-[25].
Mr. Kolb: He was known as somebody to be – don’t get in crossways with him.
Mrs. Jernigan: The big cop at K-25, big stern looking guy, you know. We were scared to death of him.
Mr. Kolb: And was this when you were at Happy Valley?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, this was at K-25, regular K-25.
Mr. Kolb: So you had this feeling that, you know, you didn’t want to screw up too much or things might happen.
Mrs. Jernigan: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: I’ll be darned. Well I’ve heard rumors of this effect and there was activity going on, it wasn’t just – you know, it was serious, and that people – I guess some people probably were removed if they didn’t follow the procedures or whatever.
Mrs. Jernigan: When I was at K-25, I had met a man who I went out with several times, and sometimes we went over to Rockwood. There was a place, a nightclub over there, of a honky-tonk probably – we thought it was a nightclub – and danced, and they had live music, and often he would take his friend with us, another man, and all of a sudden his friend disappeared, and he told me that his friend was a bootlegger, and that they had found out about his bootlegging activities, and out with him.
Mr. Kolb: Oh he was working in the private bootlegging. So that was enough to –
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah that was his construction – that was back with J. A. Jones, and they were construction workers.
Mr. Kolb: So bootleggers were not acceptable. Yeah, well I can understand that, but yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: And I remember that this man my friend referred to the – he was pretty contemptuous of that. He didn’t like the fact that his friend had to leave, and he was fairly contemptuous. I remember he called them the Gestapo, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my, yeah, didn’t like the authority, right. So anyway, the war ended and things changed real fast of course. Y-12 went way down and Happy Valley was gone –
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: – population took a nosedive for a few years there – of course, things were still muddy; now let’s talk about the mud.
Mrs. Jernigan: You know, I didn’t experience mud. I think the people who came and were married and lived in houses – but I –
Mr. Kolb: Okay, around the dorms, it wasn’t so bad?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, I never – I read about the mud, but I never experienced the mud.
Mr. Kolb: Not as much at least.
Mrs. Jernigan: No. I remember the boardwalks, and I went to church at United Church, there was youth group there that I joined, hooked up with, and we used to build fires out behind the Chapel on the Hill and roast marshmallows and things and sing, and I remember particularly that boardwalk that we traveled up there in that region.
Mr. Kolb: Well, yeah, I think you’re right; it’s more up on the hillside where people were having rapid construction and –
Mrs. Jernigan: Where the houses were.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, but that was one of the famous things you hear about. Well, and that brings me to the question – when you went into Knoxville, which I assume you did occasionally, maybe to shop or party or whatever, how were you treated or what was the attitude?
Mrs. Jernigan: I didn’t experience any bad attitudes. It may have been because I wasn’t –
Mr. Kolb: You were Tennessean. You did have an outside – the non-Tennessee voice?
Mrs. Jernigan: Right, right. I didn��t sound like a foreigner, but I never experienced anything.
Mr. Kolb: But did you go into Knoxville frequently to shop or whatever?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes. Went in to shop, buy clothes and shoes especially, I remember especially buying shoes in Knoxville, and I remember one shoe salesman that had worked here in Oak Ridge, or either subsequently worked in Oak Ridge, because I remember seeing that man here in Oak Ridge in addition to his shoe shop, shoe store. And I remember, I didn’t know it at the time, but Will Minter’s father was the chef at Miller’s. Miller’s Department store had a restaurant.
Mr. Kolb: Right, I remember that. That went on for a long time ’cause I remember going there.
Mrs. Jernigan: And Will’s father until he retired fairly recently, I guess, was the chief guy there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, he’s still alive?
Mrs. Jernigan: Still alive.
Mr. Kolb: So you didn’t really have any –
Mrs. Jernigan: No bad experiences.
Mr. Kolb: – outside kind of feeling of being not accepted?
Mrs. Jernigan: No I had –
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause you had plenty of money, that was one thing, you got well paid, and they were glad to get your business.
Mrs. Jernigan: Well, I don’t know about that, but –
Mr. Kolb: Well, relatively.
Mrs. Jernigan: Relatively, yes, and as you point out, I was a Tennessean and I didn’t sound different from – they probably didn’t know I was from Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Right, right. If you didn’t have a lot of mud on your shoes, that was the other clue.
Mrs. Jernigan: Give away. I went to Clinton fairly often too.
Mr. Kolb: For what reason?
Mrs. Jernigan: To shop.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: I bought clothes there.
Mr. Kolb: Was Hammer’s there then?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, not Hammer’s. There was a guy, that Clinton Toggery was there, Mr. McGinley, who ran the Hoskins Drug Store at Elm Grove. There was a Hoskins Drug Store at Elm Grove, and he managed that, and his wife had a dress shop in Clinton, and I used to like to go to Clinton because it was pretty by the river there, and nothing was very pretty here in those days, you know. We cut down a lot of things and the drive along the river was so beautiful, and I would just ride over to Clinton just to see the river.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, with other girlfriends?
Mrs. Jernigan: Sometimes, yeah, we’d say, let’s go to Clinton, and this ever present bus thing, you know, just so easy to get places.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve heard that people go to Big Ridge Park.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Maybe even, I don’t know about Norris, but Big Ridge I’ve mentioned as being kind of a hangout –
Mrs. Jernigan: Big Ridge was, it was.
Mr. Kolb: Like a weekend spot. Did you do that too?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, yes, I did that too. Swimming and picnicking.
Mr. Kolb: And the bus took you there?
Mrs. Jernigan: Well, I think boyfriends took me there, ’cause that seems to me that was when, after – I don’t believe there was a – there probably was a bus to Big Ridge, but I don’t remember riding the bus there. But it may well have been. I mean, [it was] a very popular place.
Mr. Kolb: Think of swimming, did you ever go to the Oak Ridge Pool, swimming pool?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Much, I mean, in the summer time?
Mrs. Jernigan: Un-huhn.
Mr. Kolb: Lot of people went there.
Mrs. Jernigan: Lot of people. Yes, I went there. And also, there was a pool at Solway where we went, too, and I don’t know who owned it or what, but there was a little pool at Solway that – after I had young children, because the Oak Ridge pool was so cold – and some of us with young children found out that there was a pool at Solway that had warmer water and we took our little ones over there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I see, it didn’t chill them so badly I bet, yeah. Yeah, okay, let’s stop for a second.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: And where else did you go, Helen?
Mrs. Jernigan: We went to the Smokies. We had – I belonged to the Carbide Girls Club when I worked at K-25, and I was the President for one term, and very active for several years, and we had dances. We hired main bands, I mean, nationally known, and I think we had –
Mr. Kolb: Really, out of Nashville?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, out of New York. We had – my memory is lapsing, but Ted Weems, we had Ted Weems, and we had – and we could get a name band for less than a thousand dollars in those days.
Mr. Kolb: That was a lot of money then.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah. And we had – I think Woody Herman was here once.
Mr. Kolb: Wow. Was this before or after the war ended?
Mrs. Jernigan: This was, I think, after – this was after the war.
Mr. Kolb: And where would the concerts be held?
Mrs. Jernigan: They’d be dances at Grove Center in the old Grove Center place, which later became the Paragon and all that. But that was the biggest, I think that was, accommodated the most people at Grove Center. But we went to Gatlinburg. We would have house parties and we would go there for the weekend and do horseback riding and do other things, and since we were housed with the Recreation Department, it was incumbent upon me to support its activities, so every time they would give – they would have groups of people, you know, tennis and golf and horseback riding, I’d have to go and add to the numbers to kind of advocate.
Mr. Kolb: Were you a golfer until you were expected to become a golfer?
Mrs. Jernigan: No.
Mr. Kolb: Well how about horseback riding?
Mrs. Jernigan: I had done horseback riding. But there was lots of recreation. I mean there was just –
Mr. Kolb: Bowling and –
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, bowling.
Mr. Kolb: ’Course, now, golf, there wasn’t really golf available unless you went into Knoxville.
Mrs. Jernigan: No, I think I may have been mistaken about the golf, because later I did take a golf course, but I think it was from the Y. I don’t believe it was from the old Carbide Recreation Department, but there were lots of things. And there was a large skating rink at Grove, at Jefferson.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, inside.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, and people, I can remember when I worked –
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know that.
Mrs. Jernigan: It was big and when I worked at the Courier –
Mr. Kolb: Where was the building it was held in?
Mrs. Jernigan: It was just at the intersection of – is that Jefferson there?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, where the stoplight is?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Where the Shell station is?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, just towards the Boy’s Club there, that big building right there.
Mr. Kolb: Where there’s an old bank building now. I mean it’s vacant, but yeah. So there was a big building there.
Mrs. Jernigan: Big skating rink, roller rink.
Mr. Kolb: Was it called a rec hall or recreation hall or just –
Mrs. Jernigan: No, it was just the roller rink and they played roller hockey there. Roller hockey was a big deal.
Mr. Kolb: I never heard about that before.
Mrs. Jernigan: Big deal.
Mr. Kolb: Was it the only roller skating place in town?
Mrs. Jernigan: I think so. No, no I think, let’s see – yes it was. Yes, but it was large. And people got married on skates there.
Mr. Kolb: My goodness sakes.
Mrs. Jernigan: There was important –
Mr. Kolb: Craziness went on even then.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: People do strange things to get married anymore, so it was not unusual. I’ve heard that the Special Engineering Detachment Army group, maybe it wasn’t, but they had sports teams – football, basketball. Did people, I guess, ever attend those games? Like they played at Blankenship Field?
Mrs. Jernigan: I didn’t.
Mr. Kolb: Did you know about them?
Mrs. Jernigan: Didn’t even know about them.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: I knew about the Special Engineering people of course, who attended all the dances, but other than dance partners, I didn’t know them too well and wasn’t sports minded. I mean I was never very sports minded, anyway.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I just wondered whether it would’ve, ’cause I’ve been told by a SED member that they had all these teams, you know, and it was a big activity, when they competed in a league, perhaps, but anyway, I just wondered. Well how about high school games, did you ever go to those? Football or –
Mrs. Jernigan: No, not till I had kids that were that age.
Mr. Kolb: Right, older, yeah. Well then, the town kept growing and finally there was talk about opening the gates, right? Becoming normalized. How did that – were you involved in that to any degree?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, in fact I did not attend the famous opening, and I don’t know why. I don’t remember why – maybe I went home. I went home to Pleasant Hill at least once a month for the whole weekend, just routinely went back home, since it was so close and ��
Mr. Kolb: Do you have siblings?
Mrs. Jernigan: No.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, didn’t know.
Mrs. Jernigan: Parents.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: And I guess I had grandparents still there when I first came here. My grandmother was still living but not my grandfather.
Mr. Kolb: So you had frequent visits back and forth. And so you missed the big opening. But I mean, I understand there was some controversy. Some people didn’t want the town to be opened up and didn’t want it to become normal and fought it for a while.
Mrs. Jernigan: That’s right. I was aware of that, that there were people who thought that. I don’t know –
Mr. Kolb: “We’re going to start paying taxes here one of these days,” you know, things like that.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, and that those hillbillies would just come in. They carried shotguns; they’d come in and get us.
Mr. Kolb: Really? Hillbillies?
Mrs. Jernigan: There were some people who were literally afraid of the natives, I mean afraid of some unknown out there that – we’d been so protected here.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, yeah, right, sheltered, yeah. I’ll be darned – the hillbillies. So that was a reflection of Oak Ridge bias.
Mrs. Jernigan: Town and gown. And I remember that, and that has troubled us for a long time and still continues, that people in the county outside Oak Ridge think we’re all rich, you know, and think we’re all educated.
Mr. Kolb: They’re jealous, jealous, yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: And they’ve got a little jealousy there.
Mr. Kolb: Even though it’s not true.
Mrs. Jernigan: And for our part we think that they’re all – I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: Well we’ve said the word ‘hillbilly,’ and that’s kind of a crude, you know, form, you know.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, rednecks.
Mr. Kolb: Or whatever, I think, so whatever, you know, it’s not true either.
Mrs. Jernigan: But I think that, I hope that’s –
Mr. Kolb: It’s us and them, kind of like, yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: Us and them, a town and gown sort of thing.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right.
Mrs. Jernigan: I hope that’s changing.
Mr. Kolb: Well it’s still there to a degree, old stories never die very easily, but it did happen of course. Now, when did you get active in politics? You’ve been active in politics locally long. When did that start? I mean, with your first husband?
Mrs. Jernigan: I think, no, well before that, I think I voted for Harry Truman the first time, first time I voted in a presidential election.
Mr. Kolb: Was it ’48?
Mrs. Jernigan: Must have voted before that if it was ’48 ’cause I was old enough.
Mr. Kolb: See, Roosevelt died in ’44, didn’t he? And Truman took over and then he ran and – when it was ’46, anyway. ’46, ’48, whichever.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, anyway, I voted.
Mr. Kolb: Right after the war.
Mrs. Jernigan: After the war, yes.
Mr. Kolb: But I mean, you became – voting is one thing, but you became active in party politics at some point.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, right. I think in Albert – when I first became really active was in – Albert Gore, Sr. was senator, and I worked in his campaigns. I was women’s coordinator for Oak Ridge for the Gore campaign then, and just never have stopped and got interested on a local level as well because I do –
Mr. Kolb: Did some friend get you involved in that or did you –
Mrs. Jernigan: Lloyd Alexander.
Mr. Kolb: Lloyd Alexander. I took engineering from him at [unclear: ORSO].
Mrs. Jernigan: He noticed that I was interested in politics but didn’t seem to know where to go with it, you know, and he got me involved, and –
Mr. Kolb: And he was involved?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: So that was the beginning, with Gore, Sr.
Mrs. Jernigan: Right.
Mr. Kolb: But I mean, you were also at a local level too.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: The county.
Mrs. Jernigan: Un-huhn. As I became acquainted with other Democratic Party members, when I – then, they were involved on all levels.
Mr. Kolb: I guess you knew the Claibornes?
Mrs. Jernigan: Oh, yes.
Mr. Kolb: Is she still around?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, she moved to South Carolina. She’s built a house on her grandfather’s land, perhaps her great-grandfather had lived there also, and it was a very sentimental sort of move for her, but she comes back periodically.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. She was here during the war? I mean, I didn’t know that until – I knew him.
Mrs. Jernigan: I don’t believe she was here during the war.
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know, I mean –
Mrs. Jernigan: I think they came a little later. I’m not sure about that, but, yes we worked together on things.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: And she was, as I’m sure you know, she was one of the driving forces for incorporation [of the City of Oak Ridge].
Mr. Kolb: Oh she was? I didn’t know that.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes. She sort of headed up the – spearheaded that movement and did a lot of the –
Mr. Kolb: Wasn’t she active in the North Ridge Trail?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes she was.
Mr. Kolb: Were you involved in that?
Mrs. Jernigan: No, just grateful, ’cause it – we could see it almost from here.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right?
Mrs. Jernigan: We’re so close to it.
Mr. Kolb: Kind of named after her, I guess, for a while. I know we got national recognition; it was an honor.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, it’s recognized as a national walking trail, I think they call it. And we’ve got maps and everything.
Mr. Kolb: Yep, it’s one of our features, yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: Once in a while we clear off an access path down to it, and then we let it grow up again.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, they were one of the active people, I remember, in Democratic circles for a long time. I just didn’t know where she went after her husband died. I know she sold that house up on West Outer.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, and she also formed, founded, gathered together a group called the Concerned Democrats, which was a group opposed to the Vietnam War, and I was a member of that as well.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I see, so, a sub-group of the Democrats.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: I remember that name, yeah. Lots of activities, lots of activities. Well what do you think, looking back? I should say this – gotta say this correctly because my wife’s a school teacher. She always corrects me when I say ‘most unique.’ It either is or isn’t unique. But yet, what is the most unique aspect of your Oak Ridge remembrances, if you can pick one or two out of all the things you went through and –
Mrs. Jernigan: I think the first is the Happy Valley experience, because it was so otherworldly. I mean, it was like, unreal, and I didn’t know where I was. I mean, nobody – I didn’t know that this was Oak Ridge or didn’t know until later, and it was just a kind of a little –
Mr. Kolb: Microcosm?
Mrs. Jernigan: Microcosm, exactly. That was the most dramatically different of anything I’d ever experienced before or since, to see that enormous activity, of building –
Mr. Kolb: Constant, 24 hours a day.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, and to be living there, and that was probably the most dramatic thing. And all my years have been pleasurable and all my jobs have been interesting, but I think that had the most, the most unique.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, yeah, I’m sure it would be, yeah. That’s what I’ve been told, you know, that you just can’t believe the activity, and, well, when you think about 75,000 people living in Oak Ridge, I mean, and you say the buses never stopped, that the people at the cafeterias never stopped, things went on seven days a week night and day, bedlam, I only think, almost controlled bedlam.
Mrs. Jernigan: Right, that’s a good description.
Mr. Kolb: But your involvement in the publicity area was very important, the Carbide Courier for example was, you know, they started a local newspaper, I forget what it was called. But all those activities, and those were controlled by the Army weren���t they? To some degree.
Mrs. Jernigan: Certainly the plants.
Mr. Kolb: You couldn’t say certain things and you couldn’t report on certain other things.
Mrs. Jernigan: Certainly the plant newspaper, which had to – we had to – there was a censorship group, but I don’t remember exactly what they were called when it was part of security – that we had to pass everything through them.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, before it got printed.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, I don’t know how my book review of the The Yogi and the Commissar got past them, but it was innocent on my part, you know. It was a good book and it was what I had to read that week. But the newspaper – The Oak Ridge Journal was the early newspaper. McCarthy, with whom I worked at K-25, left to be the editor of that newspaper, which didn’t – or maybe the successor to that newspaper. There was an Oak Ridge something else, but that didn’t last long. It didn’t make it, and then the Oak Ridger came along, with young Dick Smyser and I applied for a job there as women’s page editor and got it, but they were going to pay me thirty dollars a week and –
Mr. Kolb: Full-time? Was it full-time employment?
Mrs. Jernigan: Full-time employment, and I just couldn’t do it, and Dick teases me about that still and tells everybody that I –
Mr. Kolb: You couldn’t do it.
Mrs. Jernigan: Well, I meant that there was less money than I thought I deserved, was worth, so I didn’t take the job with the Oak Ridger at that time. Later on, I worked for the Oak Ridger, in more recent years, as a reporter and founded that – Mary Smyser and I founded the Incky column. We were the first Inckies.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, good for you. Your idea, kind of? Your idea to have it?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah we set the policy and decided how we wanted to do it and –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, what was the – I’ve heard that. What was the original idea behind it? What kind of questions were you trying to solve?
Mrs. Jernigan: Well the little symbol for Incky and the funny spelling of it came out of the Incorporation Movement.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: At the time there was a move to incorporate, the paper instituted a question and answer column that they called Incky for – short for incorporation, and had this little figure, this little atomic figure, and so when we revived – when Dick and Tom Hill wanted to revive the column as an action mind, citizen action mind column, which many newspapers have, they decided to use that same little Incky symbol.
Mr. Kolb: Incky, yeah, I didn’t know that. I’d never heard that, incorporation. That’s a connection.
Mrs. Jernigan: Spelled I-N-C-K-Y. That’s where that came from.
Mr. Kolb: It’s a piece of history that, you know, is different, yeah, right, and you were involved in doing the Incky column with Mrs. Smyser?
Mrs. Jernigan: Uh-hunh. We did it on our dining – we did it from home. We took the questions and we’d be at her house one week and mine the next, and we’d divvy up the questions and we were anonymous. Nobody knew who we are, who Incky is, and still – I think that’s still a policy of the paper, that not many people know who writes the Incky column, because you’d be beset with people talking to you about it.
Mr. Kolb: That’s for sure, yeah, wouldn’t want your phone ringing: “Why didn’t you get my question in there this week?” or whatever.
Mrs. Jernigan: Exactly.
Mr. Kolb: But okay, let’s go with the second most unique experience or atmosphere or what you want to recall about Oak Ridge. Your first one was very good, of course. Is there an early Oak Ridge attitude, or whatever you want to call it, from the WWII era that maybe stands out in your mind?
Mrs. Jernigan: I guess the youthfulness and the energy.
Mr. Kolb: Vigor, yeah.
Mrs. Jernigan: The physical energy and excitement. There was still a lot of excitement in people when, back in those days, and I believe that the period when I lived in the “D” house was, for me, the most fulfilling or exciting time.
Mr. Kolb: You involved with so many people.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Five roommates or housemates and something going on all the time I bet. Did you have phones then, back then?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes, we had a phone.
Mr. Kolb: You did?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes. In the dorms, I think there was a – I think you had to go down to the lobby, as I recall, to use the phone. There were desk clerks there, but I think the only phone was in the lobby. But we had a phone in the “D” house.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, I wasn’t sure, but I know that, now, there was a period when there was work phones and they got [inaudible].
Mrs. Jernigan: So I guess that period would be the most – and work was interesting. Everything was – the high level of interest in each other and community life and so much to do. Of course, there’s still so much to do.
Mr. Kolb: But there was a period, you know, right after the war when no one knew whether the town was going to survive, and a lot of uncertainty, too, until the government, the Washington people, decided, well this was an asset, don’t want to let go of it.
Mrs. Jernigan: There’s a lot of talk about that. And I know, everybody said, you know, like they’d say, “When we leave,” or “If this town survives,” or – there was that sort of uncertainty.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, until things got sort of on the map, you might say.
Mrs. Jernigan: Right.
Mr. Kolb: But there’s no promise that this is going to make it, ’cause there’s no –
Mrs. Jernigan: And lots of people did leave and go back to their jobs.
Mr. Kolb: In fact most of them did; more left than stayed.
Mrs. Jernigan: Of course, of course.
Mr. Kolb: You met people and a year later they were gone, two years later they were gone, the job ended and that was that.
Mrs. Jernigan: They left.
Mr. Kolb: So, but, a passing fancy, almost.
Mrs. Jernigan: And perhaps that was part of the excitement, the immediacy lent excitement, because people didn’t know whether it would be permanent or it was lifetime. Eat, drink, and be merry.
Mr. Kolb: That’s right. Who knows? Well, it was wartime; the psychology was different too.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Willing to do without and willing to, but –
Mrs. Jernigan: I’m sure somebody’s described to you – I can’t because I was not a customer – but about the bootlegging that went on.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve never heard that discussed, I mean.
Mrs. Jernigan: I don’t know it firsthand, but apparently –
Mr. Kolb: During wartime, I mean, I knew it went on, but I can’t remember it myself. But it didn’t ever involve me, but I’m sure it was part of – well, there was bootlegging done by officials too – the famous – his name was – got arrested flying in from somewhere. Murray, John Murray, head of Y-12? This was after the war.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, okay.
Mr. Kolb: He was carrying back stuff in his suitcases. He was arrested. It was big news.
Mrs. Jernigan: I don’t remember that.
Mr. Kolb: It was kind of taken for granted, I guess, these guys would do it, and he got nabbed. I guess they figured once too often or something like that, but it was kind of a particular thing. He didn’t do any time, of course, but somebody paid a fine.
Mrs. Jernigan: That was a big adventure, you know, going to Oakdale or going to Chattanooga. Oakdale had stores for a while, liquor stores.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, really?
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: My goodness, was Roane County a dry county?
Mrs. Jernigan: It’s Morgan County.
Mr. Kolb: It’s Morgan County.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Was a wet county?
Mrs. Jernigan: Wet for about one year, I think, and during that time, Oak Ridgers had a steady beat.
Mr. Kolb: So the bootleggers lost out then for a while.
Mrs. Jernigan: Except some people didn’t want to drive up there.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, bootleggers made home delivery right?
Mrs. Jernigan: That’s what I understand.
Mr. Kolb: That’s what they say, yeah, one of the features, yeah. And there was plenty of drinking going on, partying, I guess, plenty of parties and the young people, yeah. Beer and liquor were part of the scene, I’m sure. And I’m sure there was a little drunkenness going on too.
Mrs. Jernigan: Yeah, I don’t remember much drunkenness. I do remember that in the early days at the tennis court dances, there was reportedly a murder there one night.
Mr. Kolb: During the dance?
Mrs. Jernigan: During the dance, but it was – of course it was not in the papers, and after that we all began to talk about how probably a lot of bad things went on here, but it wouldn’t be publicized. So then we got a little paranoid about that, you know, how much crime was going on that wasn’t being talked about. And this legend of the murder at the tennis court dance prevailed for some time. It was supposedly out, somebody out, just outside the fence or something.
Mr. Kolb: I see, someone got in an argument and pulled a knife or who knows what.
Mrs. Jernigan: Something, and maybe it didn’t happen, you know, but that was the rumor.
Mr. Kolb: This was a rumor, but it was never – okay.
Mrs. Jernigan: Sort of a strong rumor.
Mr. Kolb: I’d never heard that.
Mrs. Jernigan: And security controlled the press with such, that you would never hear, and actually I think that – not controlled the press, but the press early – and by the press I mean the Oak Ridger – was very careful about ever criticizing DOE or its predecessors. Now it’s wide open, fair game, but in those days you just didn’t, you just didn’t do that, and I think that’s kind of a carryover from the censorship of the war days.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you were totally dependent on the government then. There was no private industry here then, basically, so it was totally a kept town. So why bite the arm, the hand, the everything that feeds you? You better – you may not like it, but you just don’t talk about it, you know. Was there anything I’ve missed that we should talk about? I mean that you want to add or – I don’t want to put words in your mouth, of course, but in terms of your own experiences that you might think was unique.
Mrs. Jernigan: I don’t, I don’t think of anything. Jim, I think you’ve asked some good questions and made me think about the unique experiences which I’ve discussed and particularly in regard to the Happy Valley experience, it seems like a dream. And there have been times when I’ve told people about this, that I’ve felt like I was making it up. I’d think, this happened, you know, but I’m not making it up, but it has a dreamlike sort of character in my memory.
Mr. Kolb: You know, you’re not the only one that I’ve heard this kind of feeling about. In fact, when I came here in ’54, Happy Valley physically was gone, and I never even knew about it until about a year ago. I mean I’ve heard the word but, you know, I thought it was some name of a valley out there, you know, a physical valley. And I couldn’t believe when they said there was twelve thousand people living that were out there; everything was there. Where was it, you know? Well, you can find tracks here and there, but, you know, it’s gone by now. When did they knock the buildings down, do you recall?
Mrs. Jernigan: Well they must have knocked them down during the nine month period when I was back in school after nineteen – it must have been 1944 and ’45, because when I came back, they were gone.
Mr. Kolb: Oh the buildings were gone too? I’m talking about the buildings being removed.
Mrs. Jernigan: The construction – I mean the theater and the grocery store, yeah, yeah, they were gone.
Mr. Kolb: But the barracks and everything?
Mrs. Jernigan: Barracks and everything.
Mr. Kolb: Everything, oh, see, I didn’t know when that happened. I knew it was gone when I came in ’54, I mean it was no trace.
Mrs. Jernigan: I think it was gone within a year’s time, maybe less.
Mr. Kolb: So it was built up in probably ’43, ’44, and gone by ’45.
Mrs. Jernigan: I believe so.
Mr. Kolb: Late ’45 or ’46.
Mrs. Jernigan: There may have been some, some of the old ones on the – of course it was all on the opposite side of the highway from the plant buildings. There may have been some residual stuff over there, but I think the barracks were all gone. I know they were all gone.
Mr. Kolb: Well, let me ask about this out there. Did you have any interaction with the Wheat community people or, let’s see, the old, I guess it was the Wheat Church and there’s the Wheat School? There was a real community out there right nearby.
Mrs. Jernigan: No, I saw it as I went by, but no. I’m sure that Colleen must have described that to you ’cause I think maybe there were – I think that the school – I don’t know whether they –
Mr. Kolb: I don’t know what happened to that school, whether they kept it going. It was an elementary and a high school, both, and I don’t know what happened. I suspect that the people, it had to be, were part of those that were moved out, so that, you know, I suspect that all shut down.
Mrs. Jernigan: I think so.
Mr. Kolb: And so – but before the war, it was a very active community and they still have reunions every year.
Mrs. Jernigan: There’s a – have you seen any of the books that have come out of Clinton?
Mr. Kolb: I’m going to stop.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Well, Helen, thank you. This has been very interesting, and we leave it go at that for now. Thank you.
[end of recording]